


SPARTAN: Deus ex Machine

by Vixen_Tail



Category: Halo, Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Original Character Death(s), War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2014-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-30 12:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 35
Words: 373,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vixen_Tail/pseuds/Vixen_Tail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. 343-Guilty Spark succeeded in activating the HALO Ring World despite the interference of the SPARTAN Master Chief and the AI Cortana. In a attempt to 'save' her SPARTANs, Dr. Halsey sends a total of 25 SPARTANs out into deep space, seventeen of which now survive as something else entirely. Of the seventeen survivors, confronted with the civil war of another race, half join the Autobots, a few linger in the background, and several decide to 'save' the Decepticons.<br/>Rebooted as of 10/18/2014</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Cybertronian Time Measurements used:
> 
> Centivorn = 100 vorns = 8300 Years
> 
> Vorn = 10 stellar cycles = 83 Years
> 
> Stellar Cycle = 2 Decacycles = 8 Years 7 Months
> 
> Decacycle = 50 megacycles = 4 Years 3 Months
> 
> Megacycle = 10 cycles/orns = 3 Weeks 6 Days 21 Hours
> 
> Cycle = 20 joors = 2 Days 18 Hours 55 Minutes
> 
> Orn = Cybertronian Day (or 15 joors)
> 
> Joor = 10 breems = 3 Hours 20 Minutes 47 Seconds
> 
> Breem = 20 Minutes 4 Seconds

_2552 September 26th_

_There is a vast difference between a soldier returning victorious and one returning in defeat,_ mused Cortana idly as she watched the goings on from her position situated in the neck junction of the MJOLINER Mark V armor the Master Chief was currently wearing.

As a part of SPARTAN-117's issued field equipment, the AI had been overlooked by omission in the rush to debrief the Master Chief after the Battle of Instillation 04. That oversight allowed her observe the current 'Top Secret' meeting going on between the UNSC's military brass, a scattering of Office of Naval Intelligence personnel, a bare handful of civilian scientists, and SPARTAN numbered 117… otherwise known as both the Master Chief and John-117.

A meeting of so many highly placed personal might have been glaringly noticeable or regarded as suspiciously obvious in a Top Secret security perspective, if they all hadn't been on the planet Reach's ONI base codenamed CASTLE where the SPARTAN programs had begun.

Half of the planet had been glassed in a previous attack by the Covenant forces but it was still utilized as per human stubbornness. In a partly by hiding in plain sight and partly refusing to change in the wake of someone else's ire type of way.

Cortana's subroutines popped up with a remark she once heard Dr. Catherine Halsey quip to another scientist, about so called 'Top Secret' projects and those who knew about them. According to the scientist that had engineered the SPARTAN-II Project, 'Top Secret' meant that everyone in the vicinity already knew and they were just waiting for the rest of the idiots to get with the program.

The AI considered speaking up with a similar comment, then discarded the impulse as illogical and refocused on the current 'argument' being voiced by the military brass, the covert ops agents, and the peers of her programmer.

"-reckless. We should have scrapped-"

"-only hope that the process is reversible-"

"-nuke it. The damned infernal _thing_ can't-"

"-it's rampant. It's not like we ever came across-"

Even just barely minutes into the meeting, Cortana could literally _feel_ John's aggravation with those assembled. Hooked into the MJOLNIR-V armor he was still wearing as she was, the AI had a hard line into the medical monitoring system built into the suit's inner workings. The readouts listed most of the physical signs of human irritation, most noticeably the tenseness in the muscular system and rising spikes in adrenaline, lacing throughout the SPARTAN-II's body.

Physically, John looked every inch of a professional soldier to any observer, even when irritated or pissed off. That would be, if any of the assembled could actually _see_ him.

The Master Chief had refused the suggestion that he take off the armor that he'd been wearing when he escaped the HALO Ring World before this meeting, and Cortana now knew why John had flatly turned the suggestion down.

SPARTAN-117 could intimidate ODST marines in minimal armor for mock training runs, could even make other SPARTANs step back in regular issued armor when irritated by whatever mission they were on, and make most of the Covenant forces run from him in the armor meant only for SPARTAN soldiers on any battlefield.

The MJOLNIR mark V armor that John was still wearing was only a cracked plate or two from being scrapped in its entirety as a lost cause. The orange visor had stopped a needle spray at one point, leaving a few short, undetonated spikes of exploding crystal still embedded in the tempered glass and a lace work of spider web cracks in ever expanding circles around them. An unexpected tangle with a Hunter pair had ended with the left chest plate bearing a foot print of one of them, denting in most of the armor plating around it. Scrapes and nicks showed bare metal on all of the visible plates of armor, only glimpsed by looking at where the veritable rainbow of blood and gore had been scraped, flaked, or rubbed off.

Human red, Hunter orange, Grunt blue, Jackal purple, and the oozing putrid greenish yellow of the Flood painted the armor in a violent art work that only the truly demented would or could admire.

Cortana gleefully recalled the memory file of the eleven point eight three seconds of ringing silence that greeted the Master Chief's entrance to the dingy council room. Shock and awe might not only be a battle field tactic, but one that was useful in political settings as well.

She positively wallowed in the file for two point five seconds, until the AI noticed that all the ONI agents had at one point slipped out of the room and one of the military brass had stood up to address the SPARTAN-II still standing at attention in front of them. "We can argue about this later, gentlemen. Do you have anything else to add to your report, Master Chief?"

"Not at this time, sir." Stated with the even almost bland tone of every SPARTAN reporting to a duty officer, only Cortana knew John was still irritated at them by grace of the medical program she could still call up.

Giving the SPARTAN a distracted nod and a halfhearted salute, that was returned with the military precision that marked every SPARTAN trained soldier, the brigadier general returned to glaring at the scientist on his right and spoke to SPARTAN-117 over his shoulder. "You're dismissed then, soldier."

John executed a perfect about face, strode the few feet to the door he used to enter the council room, and left behind him seven military officers and six scientist arguing fault with each other.

Five minutes and forty-seven point three seconds later, the AI was unsurprised to see the office door of Dr. Catherine Halsey appear in the few functioning sensors built into the battered visor John was still wearing.

Every SPARTAN made it a habit to drop by or at least see the good doctor at least once if they found themselves on Reach or wherever she was for any decent amount of time. So even if SPARTAN-117 was scheduled to remain on Reach for four days the visit would appear unremarkable to anyone, ONI included, that watched the SPARTANs' activities and habits for any reason.

In truth, ONI found everything about the SPARTANs' apparent affection for the scientist, who was responsible for the SPARTAN-II program, and by association since it was her work that was used the SPARTAN-III programs, suspicious. Even Halsey herself was a little baffled by the attention, even if she was grateful for the positive light the SPARTAN soldiers held her in, as she still had trouble dealing with the guilt of what had been done to them in the name of human survival.

What ONI didn't know, and Dr. Halsey only could guess about, is how the surviving SPARTANs viewed the reason behind their augmentation and training.

None of them really regretted being picked for the SPARTAN programs at this point, they had long since come to terms with what they now were, even most of the SPARTAN-IIIs had volunteered for the duty before being smashed against the Covenant in what basically amounted to mass suicide missions.

Most of the still surviving SPARTANs viewed their current situation as something that was distasteful but necessary, and blamed the human rebels for the SPARTAN-IIs and the Covenant for the SPARTAN-IIIs. Cortana had only found out because she had been intergraded into the MJOLNIR mark V armor's neural interface when John had asked a few of the undecided SPARTAN-IIIs about their view of the current war.

The AI's attention was drawn to the present when John smashed his fist against the wall next to Dr. Halsey's door, leaving a dent in the metal sheeting the hallway.

The brunette scientist cautiously opened the door in answer to the overly loud knock on the wall, then threw it wide enough to admit the SPARTAN and took a few steps to the side as he entered. 117 carefully shut the door as Dr. Catherine Halsey returned to her desk to curl up in the chair behind it and leveled him with a stern look. "I take it this is not a social call, John."

"No ma'am." The Master Chief removed his battered helmet to gently tug out Cortana's AI core, embedded in the neck of the armor. "Cortana has a few files you might want to take a look at."

Halsey remained silent throughout the AI's report of the Battle of Instillation 04, and the actions of the Forerunner AI, 343-Guilty Spark. As Cortana wound down to the events that lead to the activation of the HALO Ring Worlds and the delaying program she managed to implant into the Forerunner AI's original programming, the scientist's mouth thinned to a hard line with her eyes locked on the Forerunner programs that Cortana copied for proof of what 343-Guilty Spark had been after.

After the AI had finished, Halsey looked up to the still silent Master Chief.

"Well... this is bad." She wasn't sure, but she thought John had almost laughed at her inane statement, or would have if he hadn't had the SPARTAN training in keeping blank expressions on at all times to fall back on.

"Yes ma'am." 117 didn't twitch from his seat, his shattered visor held in his lap reflecting the faint glow of Cortana's and Jerrod's avatars floating above the hologram emitter on her desk.

Halsey thought through the likely responses from each quarter as she sank back into her chair.

The United Nation's Space Command would favor an act of aggression, most likely in the form of a few tactical warheads lobbed at the HALO Ring World, or another incursion of SPARTANs in the hopes that something would halt the activation of whatever weapon 343-Guilty Spark was certain would 'wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy'.

ONI would sulk around the edges for most of whatever time was left, and they might possibly set more than a few scientists with the task of inventing a type of shielding that may let a number of humans survive.

The civilian sector... most would possibly panic, and they might not be told at all to keep the peace, leaving a possible few numbers of highly placed governors or politicians informed of even part of their current crisis.

Jerking her head up to pin the Master Chief with a flat look, Halsey was about to ask what had John so worried... when the obvious smacked into her with the force of a runaway Warthog. 117 was the highest ranking SPARTAN active in the Navel Special Warfare Command, and like any CO he was worried about the wellbeing and fate of his soldiers.

The UNSC brass would concentrate on the soldiers, true... but few of them knew about where in the chain of command the SPARTANs reported to. Even if someone thought about them, the SPARTAN Projects had enough opposition in high places that being overlooked in the panic would be a convenient handle for some objectionable people to eliminate the surviving super soldiers.

Halsey drummed her fingers on the desk separating her and the SPARTAN, meeting his stare with her own. "If we do this, I'm going to need some help."

"Yes ma'am." John leaned forward and snagged one of her data pads from the desk. "Gamma-four-five-eight has anything you could need hidden away already. If you find that she doesn't, one-two-seven is on base currently and will not object to assisting in the ' _acquisition'_ of anything else." The Master Chief stood and handed the altered data pad back. Dr. Halsey couldn't suppress the curiosity that prompted her to look at the screen. "I am on leave for another four days, and then I ship out again, ma'am."

Faintly lit but still readable, the screen showed only one phrase with his digital signature at the bottom.

' _Retreat to fight another day – One-one-seven_.'

\V/

_15:22 September 29th 2552_

There was an underground wing of the main military ran hospital on Reach. Unknown to the miners and farmers that had usually made up the hospital's patients before the Covenant attack, that was where SPARTANs that had sustained massive injuries and traumas were sent to for recovery from anything from combat injuries to lifesaving surgeries.

On any given day, the ward had five to seven of the SPARTAN-IIs and a scattering of the class IIIs at any time, once ONI admitted to Dr. Halsey about the existence of the SPARTAN-III Program.

SPARTAN-117 carefully made his way past the nurses' station, nodding to the familiar faces as they waved to him. John made a habit to always swing by the ward when he could, and the few 'washed out' SPARTAN-IIs had admitted they appreciated seeing him, even for a few minutes.

As a matter of fact, one of the said SPARTAN-IIs was 117's target on that particular day. SPARTAN numbered 046 was one of the few surviving 'wash outs' from the SPARTAN-IIs augmentation. The massive SPARTAN's lower body did not take well to the ceramics added to SPARTAN bones, and as a consequence he was unable to stand upright or walk very far on his own.

Even though 046 still tried, and the nurses were becoming irritated at the crippled SPARTAN's repeated leg traumas, as his repeated attempts in trying to walk on the badly set ceramics grated them against other bones and cartilage that weren't protected correctly.

046 had then been 'claimed' by ONI after his failed augmentation to managed the deployment of his fellow SPARTANs, seeing as he still had the brain alterations and modifications that all the SPARTAN projects used, as he could rapidly look through all the incidents that might need their assistance and decide which units would work well with which SPARTAN trained to handle the problems in question.

James caught sight of John as the Master Chief ducked to pass the doorway into the physical therapy lounge where he was exercising the legs that had responded only painfully for the last few years.

117 had to hide a smile at the sight of a nurse, who really only weighed a little less than a half of any SPARTAN, scolding 046 over his repeated attempts to walk. Even as far away as he was, James still threw John a face over the smaller nurse's blond head. It was only a few scrunched up muscles and the nurse would not have noticed anything, but 117 could see the slight tension and guess the appropriate expression.

046 finally wheeled himself over to the Master Chief once the nurse was done with scolding him, a minor glare given for the light smirk he was wearing. "You would think they had better things to do than fuss."

"Maybe, but it's as funny as hell to watch you deal with it." 117 fell silent as the two soldiers waited for another nurse to pass by, and then he looked to the crippled ex-SPARTAN. "Halsey briefed you all."

Spoken more as a statement rather than a question, 046 still took it as a request for information. "Yes, along with what she planned to do about it."

In the three days since 117's return, Dr. Halsey had cornered a few of her fellow scientist into telling her what the UNSC and ONI had them doing with the Master Chief's Intel. Both John and Halsey had been disgusted to learn that the theories and suggested actions thought up by Cortana were being flat out ignored.

The UNSC had launched a full strike against the HALO Ring, including a number of tactical warheads, which had smashed uselessly against the Forerunner security measures engineered to prevent such actions being taken by the Flood possessed.

ONI had a number of stealth ships in the area, recollecting data that Cortana had already gathered, basically wasting their time. ONI had also sent a number of non-SPARTAN agents to the Ring World, incurring a rant from the scientist that amused both male SPARTANs to hear.

The only high point, if they could call it that was the limited data that was retrieved was being worked into an attempt to alter the preexisting shielding arrays so they might be used to shield a selection of humans so they would survive.

Even worse, from both the SPARTANs' and Dr. Halsey's point of view, no one that knew had any intention of informing the trillion of civilians and soldiers that looked to them for protection. It had been decided to keep them in the dark so that any rioting and panic would not interfere with the ongoing projects.

To add insult to injury, the UNSC's top brass wanted to keep the SPARTANs out on the front lines of the now pointless war. They reasoned it would keep Covenant attention on the 'demons' and provide a boost to morale, Halsey theorized that it was an obviously transparent attempt to remove the SPARTANs entirely from any possibility that they might be saved and become a part of whatever would come after.

Once she had calmed down, Catherine Halsey began to personally ensure that 'her' SPARTANs would survive, whether she had a hand in their creation or not. The scientist, with Cortana and Jerrod to help cover her digital tracks, had 'lost' a Prowler class ship, the _UNSC ATHENS_ , off every military ship roster by listing it as 'lost with all hands in battle' and hid it away. She was currently working on altering its shielding array with the AIs and two of the injured SPARTANs' help, Issac-039 and a class three SPARTAN, Nicole-Gamma458.

John-117 had to object to being 'saved'. He had, with Cortana reluctantly supporting his position, argued that he was one of the most visible and noted SPARTANs in both the civilian and military sectors and any attempt to interfere with his orders by anyone would raise red flags across the boards of both the UNSC and ONI.

Even so, Halsey had Jerrod begin to monitor the various bases and units assigned SPARTANs, both the class twos and threes, and gave him instruction to manufacture excuses and orders to pull as many as he could back to Reach within a specific time frame. The scientist threatened the Master Chief with the scenario that if he finished his next assignment early he was being 'saved', whether he liked it or not.

A good number of the SPARTANs that Dr. Halsey would be able to save would be those listed as injured, as they were the closest and had a legitimate reason to be on Reach. The rest would be the small number of SPARTANs that Jerrod would be able to order back within the limited time he had or those that have completed their assignments and have returned to Reach for their next set of orders. Even as spread out as they were, the small AI would have trouble filling the twenty-five Cryo-Stasis chambers Nicole-Gamma458 had 'acquired' for the _UNSC ATHENS_.

Lost in separate but eerily similar thoughts, both SPARTANs watched the bustle of the small army of nurses and physical therapists that worked with the injured SPARTANs. Standing outside the swirl of activity, it could almost be termed a normal day, if the nurses and therapist weren't trying to move limbs twice the normal size for humans.

Positioned as they were, 117 and 046 had a clear view of SPARTAN-127 as she slipped off the identification card her nurse was wearing. The SPARTAN saboteur would have gotten away with it, if she hadn't dangled it back in front of the tiny nurse, causing the medical professional to begin to swear at everything SPARTAN.

John snorted back a bark of laughter as the nurse, and she was a tiny thing, barely half 127's height and was easily the smallest nurse working, had rounded on the female SPARTAN shaking her finger and swearing in what 117 thought was Spanish.

The rest of the medical staff took this as the sign to stop for the day and conditioned to 127's antics as they were, they never noticed that it was a full half hour before the normally playful saboteur usually made her daily attempt for the pass card.

As the other SPARTANs made motions to convince the medical staff they would be fine, 117 wheeled 046 to the middle of the room and waited for the last of the nurses to leave. The five SPARTANs that regularly made use of the room followed, and the four that were just in for recovery from surgery locked the doors and followed them.

127 clapped her hands together, suppressed a wince at the streak of pain that shot up her right arm from her shattered and wired together bones of that side, and bounced on the balls of her feet. "So, anything else to add to this cluster fuck, sir?"

"Not really." John-117 smirked at Ash-127, who made a face and a rude gesture back to him. He sobered as he looked at the SPARTANs staring back at him. "I leave in twenty-seven hours for the planet Onyx. Dr. Halsey wants to know if you decided on where you want to go."

\V/

_23:43 September 29th 2552_

SPARTAN-127 carefully crept down a hall halfway between the restricted medical wing that housed injured SPARTANs and the hospital's large laundry room. There was a nurse station nearby; situated between the public hospital wings and the underground hole the ONI stuffed the injured soldiers that 'technically' didn't exist.

Between the nurses' station and the laundry room that marked the beginning of the restricted wing there was air conditioning vents that provided the oxygen to the lower levels of the hospital.

That vent also supplied air flow the underground wings of CASTLE and 127 had been injured and bored enough to explore it weeks before 117 returned and brought the information about 343-Guilty Spark. The late night wanderings had paid off in a much unexpected way, because she now knew a way to Dr. Halsey's office that avoided every ONI security measure the spooks had thrown up to monitor SPARTAN movements on Reach.

Prying off the grill that barred the way into the ducts was more than a little interesting, seeing as the saboteur's right arm had more crushed bones that any living person had right to claim. It was the result of being rolled over in a Scorpion tank with one arm hanging out. Reinforced bones or not, 127 still had a few weeks of recovery to go before she would get back on the active duty roster, and a few good months before it would stop hurting.

A quick tug and pull and the grate slid off, and some rather fancy maneuvering without the use of her right arm let the saboteur slide the grill and grate back into place behind her before any of the nurses could get up to investigate the unusual sounds.

Fifteen minutes of duct crawling later, Ash-127 dropped in on Dr. Halsey, literally.

To the scientist's credit, she didn't scream when the seven foot tall SPARTAN female suddenly plummeted to the floor in front of her. Mostly because she had gotten used to the late night visits by the oddly playful SPARTAN-II saboteur when she was bored stiff in the hospital wing. "Ash, I really wish you would at least use a door."

"Not nearly as fun though, doc." 127 smiled as broadly as she could, enjoying the irritated glare aimed at her. Someone was pissed with her, and that meant she was doing her job right. Another moment later, and the SPARTAN's smile faded as she got around to why she was dropping in on the scientist so late at night. "We picked something, Dr. Halsey. Somewhere else, like next galaxy over else. Less Forerunner headaches."

Only well after the flurry of activity was over and done with, with the _UNSC ATHENS_ on its way out of the galaxy with its cargo of SPARTANs, did Dr. Halsey finally have the time to realize just how efficient her SPARTANs could be and how dangerous they could have been if they hadn't been programmed to be so loyal to the UNSC.

She had heard rumors about Nicole-Gamma458 and Ash-127's penchant for getting their hands on equipment and ordinance that they should not have had access to prior to working closely with them, but it only when working with both of the female SPARTANs that the scientist realized that the rumors spread by the UNSC soldiers fell far short of the reality.

Somehow, the two of them had Covenant and Forerunner technology stashed away on the planet, and had added their collection to the ship's armory in secret. She had found it when she was inventorying the ammunition she had redirected from military stores and came across several non-human made pieces of weaponry.

Jerrod and Cortana had 'lost' an entire hanger bay for them to work on the _ATHENS_ in, which was stocked with the types of supplies that every ship needed and with its own fabrication workshop tucked away in a corner.

Nicole-Gamma458 had also 'acquired' twenty-five Cryo-Chambers from somewhere in the UNSC storage units. While she did that, Ash-127 and Keith-070 had collaborated keep the 'lost' hanger and the Prowler class ship off every UNSC ship roster and maintenance record that Cortana and Jerrod might have missed or, in an even more unlikely event, someone had later reported.

Issac-039 and another of the injured class three SPARTANs sent to Reach for recovery from a gut shot that nicked her spinal column, Eve-Gamma193, had assisted Halsey in reworking the shields and installing the twenty-five Cryo-Stasis Chambers. Keith-070, waiting for orders that he would never get, had worked with Cortana and Jerrod in programming an experimental AI, named Refit after the code name the SPARTANs assigned to their work on the _UNSC ATHENS_ , and the subprograms that would activate the AI when they reached the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way.

Even as she curled up in her office chair with a glass of wine, Catherine Halsey couldn't help but feel somewhat wistful over the events of the last month.

Hectic and fraught with worry it may have been, but she had learned more about the SPARTAN-IIs and IIIs personalities and pasts over the last month than she had during the previous year's put together. Even assisting Ash-127 to 'steal' SPARTANs in Cryo-Stasis out of the restricted ward of the hospital had its highlights, bringing a small smile to the scientist's lips as she remembered the very odd and light hearted way the female Covert Operations saboteur approached her work.

Lost in thought as she was, Halsey still noted Jerrod's small spark avatar activating and pulsing in the way she knew meant that someone had sent her a message. "What is it, Jerrod?"

"Forgive the intrusion, ma'am." Jerrod's spark avatar quivered in excitement, earning the blip of light an amused smirk from the elderly scientist. "You have an urgent message, from the Master Chief."

\V/

Sentinel Prime sat in his office, located within the main council building in Central City, with his helm supported by his hands as a vid screen blared out the current situation to the nearly empty room.

In his vorns of service to Cybertron as a Prime, the crisis currently unraveling outside of his office had never occurred to him in any future he could have foreseen.

Somewhere in the underground gladiator rings, which had been left alone as something distracting for the lower caste bots to amuse themselves with, an ex-miner mech named 'Megatron' had quietly cultivated the Cybertronians that had grievances against the Council of Ancients, nobles that controlled the large cities, and the caste systems put into effect on their behalf.

This 'Megatron' now had an entire army of mechs and femmes at his side, and in an opening salvo they had amassed and leveled the city Kalis, right down to the last mech, femme, and sparkling, before taking over Gygax by force. To compound insult to the injury he dealt to Cybertron, Megatron was now calling for the severed helms of the Council members and any other bots in high positions, namely himself and Ultra Magnus, in reparations to the damage they had caused the hard working bots that trusted them.

If he was honest to himself, Sentinel had absolutely no idea about what to do now. The Cybertronian military, or what was left of it after the fall of the Golden Age, had split down the middle; half remaining loyal to Ultra Magnus and half splitting off to follow the renegade officer Barricade; and what little security force that could be mustered were needed to keep the panicking residents of the cities safe through the crisis.

Both the still loyal military and the security force only answered to Ultra Magnus, and _slag_ the mech to the Pits if he hadn't warned the Council that the idea of splitting the population by caste might result in something happening like this.

Straxus, the oil coated glitch, had already proclaimed that he would follow Megatron, and the city of Polyhex had followed its governor, leaving the newly proclaimed 'Decepticons' with the entire south region of Cybertron, edging the Acid Sea, occupied by what could be termed 'hostile' forces.

Even as he worried the problem over and over in his own processor, Sentinel Prime's audios picked up the sound of a heavy mech running down the hall that lead to his office. Lurching upright almost too quickly, Sentinel scrambled for the service pistol he wasn't sure he knew how to use and pointed it to the door as it opened Ultra Magnus slid to a stop.

The Prime jerked his arm holding the pistol down as Magnus took a few hesitant steps forward to him. "If you're done with whatever you're doing here, Prime, we need to move you."

"Why? What else could go wrong?" Even as he said it, Sentinel just knew it had been the wrong thing to say to the mech that would most likely be responsible for keeping him alive in the upcoming, and unpleasant, vorns.

Magnus slowly took the pistol from the upset Prime. "Those so called 'Decepticons' are now demanding the All-Spark. That and a mob of bots are trying to tear down this building to get to you. They already got Greenlight, I would rather they not get to you."

"Primus, _Greenlight?_ But she was..." Shock made it easier for Ultra Magnus to steer Sentinel Prime to the open door and to the dubious safety of the streets, so they could get to Iacon's military base hopefully in one piece. Until the larger mech tried pushing the Prime out the door. "Wait!"

"Now what? We need to leave or the processor broke idiots outside might actually get you."

Sentinel waved a servo dismissively as he leapt over to the terminal on his desk. "Yes, yes. But I can do something about the All-Spark from here."

"There isn't any place on Cybertron that those Decepticons wouldn't tear apart looking for it, how do you propose to hide it?" Ultra Magnus' faceplates pulled down in confusion at the devious grin that painted itself across the Prime's mouth components.

Typing in a chain of commands, the Prime only spared Magus an absent processed look. "It wouldn't be on Cybertron. We'll send it into space, to a planet only you and I will know about. That way, these 'Decepticons' can't risk killing us both without permanently losing the All-Spark."

Ultra Magnus' mouth plates worked silently for a moment before he could summon enough processor power to work his vocalizer. "...well. Frag me."

\V/

On the approach to the target galaxy, the automated subroutines in the _UNSC ATHENS_ activated the experimental AI ' _Refit_ ' in accordance to its programmed orders. As the AI came online, the 'dumb' AI that had controlled the _ATHENS_ up to this point in its journey pulled up the noted files for Refit's benefit.

Online for the first time in nearly four thousand years, Refit herself had a fraction of a second to wonder about what she was doing in a Prowler Class Star ship before the files impatiently beeped at her for attention.

After rapidly reading all of them, she was only slightly less confused.

Locating a suitable planet for her 'cargo' of SPARTAN soldiers was estimated to take at least another seven hundred and fifty years from her current position, so she got to work. The initial files had also included a type of 'wish list', whichever SPARTAN had wrote it, she suspected 070, had listed another conflict as a desirable feature to a suitable planet.

Apparently a few of the SPARTANs that knew what was going on like that idea.

To combat or at least stave off the possibility that her alternative programing wouldn't prevent her going rampant, her orders also called for a leap frog method of a limited time 'online' directing the 'dumb' AI to another destination before spending the trip in a standby mode. Her programing would be in effect 'frozen', possibly keeping her functional if not entirely responsive for the next thousand years. The process could be staved off slightly, if there was a major issue that required her attention to fix she could stop the timer until she was put 'asleep'.

With two minutes left of her first period of awareness, she directed the navigational computers to plot a course for the first star cluster nearest the ship.

\V/

As a data clerk, Orion Pax had listened to the news vids that chronicled the start of what was now known as the 'Autobot/Decepticon Civil War' with the other clerks while they were working. He listened during the orn and argued on his off-cycles that the Decepticons might have a few valid reasons for what they were doing, but they just went about it all wrong.

Needless to say, his views had earned him a few unflattering names, the least objectionable being Decepticon sympathizer. If pressed, he would admit to preferring the Autobots, but then again no bot had bothered to ask him yet.

Controversial views or not, right now he had two Matrix Templars standing outside of his Alithex flat. "Forgive me, but could you repeat yourself?"

The Templar on his right nodded as he beckoned to the mech again. "You have been identified as a Prime. Please come with us."

\V/

Refit hummed to herself as the mineral analysis probe for the current star system she was inspecting came back and reported. Not quite enough hydrogen, so she steered the _ATHENS_ off to inspect the next system, computing the time needed for travel and setting her timer to wake her when they were nearby.

She was getting closer to a planet that would support human life; the planets that she had already looked at were only missing a few minor, and one or two major, elements that were needed to sustain a viable ecology that would sustain her SPARTANs.

From what she had seen so far, it should only take her a few more decades to find a new home for her 'cargo' of SPARTANs, and finally have someone to talk too besides celestial bodies that didn't respond.

\V/

In response to the Autobots finding a new Prime, the Decepticons demolished Alithex down to the ground.

The newly made Optimus Prime, reformatted by Alpha Trion himself, stood in the communications center of Iacon's Autobot base with his new bodyguard, an ex-military mech by the name of Ironhide, three steps behind him. Sentinel Prime and Ultra Magnus had just left Iacon all together, after stopping by to see how the new Prime was adapting to his newly reworked frame and systems.

Optimus had found a convenient use for his retractable battle mask, the inch thick slab of armor hid the lower part of his face plate and the telltale grinding of his dental plates during the meeting. The new Prime had quickly figured out that Sentinel was not one of his favorite mechs, more experienced Prime or not.

Looking over to the black mech guarding his back, Optimus tried to puzzle out what was expected of him now.

"According to Sentinel, Primes don't fight. We are too valuable to risk in some foolish battle." Ironhide just raised an optic ridge at his new Prime. "Can you teach me how?"

The black mech's optics blinked in surprise, then grinned wickedly at his new charge. "Yur gonna regret sayn' that."

"Possibly, but it will be worth it."

\V/

Refit was in the middle of a 'repair' cycle, checking up on every minor malfunction and issue the 'dumb' AI had noted and had failed to fix, when something collided with the _UNSC ATHENS._

That _something_ dumped a colossal amount of foreign energy into every system and knocked the poor AI into a feedback loop with a second massive discharge of energy that followed a split second on the heels of the first.

She spent a few precious seconds working herself loose of the scrambled programing she lost hold of, and clawed back to her previous state of function just in time to be swamped with countless error messages and warnings. Causing her a distinctly unpleasant sensation that paralyzed her programs for another few valuable moments.

As the unknown energy faded from the majority of the ship's systems and concentrated itself in a few minor secondary functions, and the consequence error reports slowed, Refit started to sort out what had happened.

Proximity sensors and cameras had recorded a visual of a cube composed of unusual metals that had impacted against the _ATHENS_ on the starboard side, rupturing the sub deck armor and venting the atmosphere into space. Anything more about the collision, or _why_ it wasn't tracked by the sensors before it impacted and reported to her, was lost due to a power surge shorting out a good deal of the memory banks that the program relied on.

The 'dumb' AI had also been lost, most likely burnt out of its circuits, as well as most of the data collected on the surrounding star systems, half of the navigational charts she had worked so hard on. The strange energy had started to wane where it was concentrated over the fusion reactor and the Cryo-Stasis tanks that held the SPARTANs.

A few abnormalities that the 'dumb' AI would have normally dealt with or alerted her to escaped Refit's attention as she tracked the cube's previous trajectory back to whoever decided that space would be a safe place to leave large cubes. As she adjusted the _ATHENS'_ course to find the source of the cube, Refit wondered about the type of creature that could make energy enhanced cubes.

Strictly speaking; cubes as perfect as the one that hit her were illogical in space. That meant someone or something had created it, and possibly launched it. This could mean that she could get help repairing the rift in the sub deck, as that was where the SPARTAN's tanks were, and possibly getting the senor array checked out.

\V/

Optimus Prime gritted his dental plates under his battle mask, something he was afraid was becoming a bad habit of his. He respected Sentinel Prime a lot, both for the work the Prime did before the commencement of hostilities and in the Government of Cybertron, but the mech was holding onto the role of a politician with a death grip.

Cybertron needed soldiers now.

Both Primes, Ultra Magnus, Ironhide, Zeta, and Ether had gathered in one of the lower level conference rooms in Central City to review the events of the last few vorns and where each section of the Autobot forces were concentrating their efforts.

In all actuality, Sentinel Prime had a well-rehearsed story about how well the war effort was going and had white washed reports from the front line he was giving the Division Heads that he had assembled together.

The tension in Optimus' frame ratcheted higher as the older Prime finally worked his way to the reports of Alithex. Before Sentinel actually got around to white washing the slaughter, a femme opened the council room doors and cleared her vocalizer.

"Sentinel Prime, sir? A few of the vid news teams are outside and they would like a word." Elita One blinked innocently at the interrupted mech as he floundered midsentence.

"Ah! Right..." Sentinel fumbled for something to say as he backed up to the door while trying to keep the council table and the bots assembled there in his view. "... I'll just go and, uh, deal with that. Carry on!"

The younger femme gave the older Prime a small smile as he slipped out the door past her. Once she was sure the mech was well out of audio range, she palmed the door controls and took a seat next to Zeta. "So, where were we?"

Optimus slumped into his chair with a hiss of hydraulics even as Ironhide laughed at him. "Almost thought ta younger Prime was gonna hit 'em."

"Perish the thought. Two Primes disliking each other? Why, that's just… unnatural. "Zeta smirked at the young Prime's weary glare.

As an ex-noble herself, Sentinel had judged her to be an acceptable Head of the Tactical Division; the fact that she had left her noble clan to become an Enforcer notwithstanding. Sheer training and prior experience in dealing with snobbish mechs were what kept the old Kaon Station Chief from cursing the older Prime from one corner of Cybertron to the next when he thought up something that irritated her or her Enforcer programing.

A crack of laughter drew the bots assembled at the conference table attention to Ether. Likewise, the mech was the 'acceptable' Head of the Special Operations Division. He had never been less than polite to the older Prime, and every other bot knew that was the old mech's way of covertly insulting Sentinel's intelligence. Ether was only polite to those he hated.

He shook his helm and pinned the younger femme with a glare. "You look way too pleased with yourself, scraplet. What did you just do?"

Elita One just shrugged at the older mech, but stiffened at the not-so-amused glare shot at her from Ultra Magnus. He was her superior, and as such, responsible for her actions.

She met his optics for a moment before looking away with a small smirk. "Nothing really, just getting back at that glitched old mech for assuming I was a secretary bot."

Zeta made an inquiring sound, Ether raised and optic ridge, but Optimus and Ironhide just laughed, remembering the first time Sentinel met Elita.

\V/

Eighty-three hours, forty-seven minuets, and thirteen point five eight seconds after the _UNSC ATHENS_ had collided with the space cube; Refit clued in to something that was very, _very_ wrong.

A large number of the _ATHENS_ ' programs had been corrupted, including a few of her own, and when she tried to fix it the resulting problems just compounded the issue entirely. On top of that, the 'dumb' AI had disappeared entirely, without any scrap programming that would normally be left when a program as complex as an AI was destroyed by an outside physical source.

That meant that she had to conduct the maintenance programs on her own, and while unusual for her, it had finally alerted her that the medical program that monitored the SPARTANs was insisting something was wrong.

Her manifest for the _ATHENS_ listed twenty-five SPARTANs; she was only getting medical readouts for twenty-four. Even worse, the base line normal stats listed by the medical monitoring program were not anywhere near what she was getting from the readout.

A quick check to the Cryo-Tanks in the cargo bay showed that the Tanks were no longer blue and frozen, they were turning a dully glowing purple and the temperature showed they were near boiling. _Additionally,_ the MJOLNIR medical systems no longer agreed with the _ATHENS'_ medical systems about the SPARTANs' status.

If Refit had hair, she would be tempted to start pulling it out by now.

She had already spent three days fixing major and minor problems, mostly relying on other programs to tell her what was wrong, and now two programs that should have agreed with each other were at odds.

The _ATHENS_ medical computer insisted, the MJOLNIR medical system objected; so Refit overruled the MJOLNIR system on the slight possibility that humans did not like to be almost boiled alive.

The _ATHENS_ tried to lower the temperature significantly, and SPARTAN-500 promptly died, pulling the protesting MJOLNIR system offline as he did so.

Refit abruptly pulled the _ATHENS_ medical program offline before it could kill any other SPARTAN, now having a vague idea on what happened to the twenty-fifth SPARTAN that had dropped off her medical report. As far as what she knew about human physiology, the _ATHENS_ had been right in lowering the temperature and she was now feeling a sickening sense of guilt.

One of the other MJOLNIR systems beeped for attention, politely requesting more energy in a encrypted signature that Refit knew.

Apparently the 'dumb' AI hadn't been destroyed in the energy surge; it had simply been re-appropriated.

Refit carefully inspected the fragments of the old AI in the MJOLNIR systems as she rerouted more energy to the Cryo-Chamber. The program that carried a trace of the 'dumb' AI politely thanked her and immediately got back to work; remarking that it would take a while to perform the necessary tasks, so she should concentrate on finding somewhere to land.

Reluctantly letting her link with the system go, Refit wondered if she was finally going rampant. That had been very _strange_ , and delusions were reported to be an aspect of a rampant AI. Had putting off her timer so long caused this?

She hesitated, torn between wanting to laugh and cry, before another MJOLNIR system beeped for more energy.

Refit wondered what else could possibly go so wrong that she would have no orders to deal with them or prior reports of the incidents happening before.

\V/

Optimus Prime leapt the last few feet to the half wall that his newest soldier was using for concealment, holding his blaster rifle close to his chassis.

The saboteur designated Jazz had been recommended to him by Ether, as the older mech had remarked that he wasn't spry enough to keep up with the energetic and crafty saboteur when he got 'rolling'.

The shorter, silver mech tilted his helm so his visor met the optics of the Prime squarely. "Not ta rush ya boss mech, but if'n we don't move, dem Cons down there migh' actually catch ya."

Optimus snorted a clog of dust out of his vents as he scanned their surroundings.

They were technically on the front lines, in the territory between Kaon and Polyhex dealing with a raiding party of Decepticons that had attempted to storm the City of Laws, and the larger portion of his unit was farther back from where they were currently.

Ironhide had stalked off a bit before to ensure that the coast was clear, and the other two mechs that he pulled to make up the un-acquired numbers of his squad kept watch on either side of the road.

"I'll take that under advisement, Jazz. Were you successful?"

"Yep." The smaller mech's visor flashed what was interpreted as a wink at the Prime. "Dem 'Cons are 'bout ta get ah very painful surprise 'n ah bit."

\V/

Polite subroutines were a first experience for Refit. The remnants of the 'dumb' AI that was now imbedded in the MJOLNIR armor systems insisted that what they were doing was necessary and helpful, but that some of the SPARTANs were in too bad of shape to survive what they were doing.

Refit couldn't argue that, seeing as a good number of the SPARTANs had been in critical condition when they were loaded into the _UNSC ATHENS_ in the first place.

Any inquires about the SPARTANs other than a status report was met by either silence or a polite suggestion to mind the course.

Otherwise, they reported in one of three ways, once she decrypted the reports enough to read. One was 'the mech/femme is doing well'; the second popular response was 'the mech/femme will rejoin the Matrix'; and one of the MJOLNIR systems always responded with 'your systems are doing well'.

Refit wasn't sure what a 'Matrix' was, but she could guess what 'mech' and 'femme' meant. She also wasn't too proud to admit that she threw what amounted to a AI's temper tantrum over the first time she heard the phrase that she later learned meant 's/he is royally _screwed_ six ways from Sunday'.

She couldn't be excessively annoyed at the mannerly programs, though, despite the growing number of 'offline' SPARTANs. When Refit compared the roster numbers of the dead to the list of severe injuries that occurred before Cryo-Stasis, the numbers matched up to the SPARTANs with a limited life expectancy after revival.

A few of the more heavily injured SPARTANs seemed to be pulling through, like Gamma-341 and 076; and if the subprograms could save more than would have otherwise died after a short time, Refit was surprisingly okay with it.

Although on the other hand, and to the strange rejoicing of the subprograms that continuously threw her for a loop, Refit had finally found an inhabited planet to land on. It could only be better if she could find out just why the subprograms were intent on _this_ planet.

\V/

Sentinel Prime gaped at the messenger. The other mechs and femmes that had been summoned to the impromptu meeting weren't faring much better, but they were better at hiding it.

"Windcharger," mildly pleased he had finally remembered the communications bot's designation, Optimus Prime waved the younger mech to a chair, "Would you kindly repeat that for us, please?"

Windcharger's systems heated up in embarrassment at the attention, but took the proffered seat with a quiet mummer of thanks. "I-it looks like... w-well, a space ship, Prime sir, uh, sirs. But it doesn't match any of our ship designs, or even responding to any of the codes we try to make contact with."

Sentinel was still staring blankly, but had managed to shut his gaping mouth components.

Ultra Magnus waited a nanoklick for the Prime he served to think of anything before speaking up with a question of his own. "Where is this thing headed?"

The reporting mech looked straight at Magnus. "Just a bit south of the Yuss-Simfur border, a little north of what's left of Kalis, sir."

Optimus' optic ridge rose as he thought, then frowned at Elita One, who shook her helm back. She didn't have any bots she could spare nearby either. "Tyger Pax would be the closest city we have control of. Is there any bot nearby that we can spare to check it out?"

Magnus and Ether shook their helms, but Zeta looked thoughtful. "Maybe, but it wouldn't be any bot I could vouch for."

Sentinel shook off his shock and frowned at the assembled mechs and femmes. "Kalis is close to the Decepticon lines. We shouldn't risk lives for curiosity's sake."

"Maybe so," optics locked with Ether, who nodded back, then Optimus spoke up against Sentinel for the first time, "but they might be able to help us."

\V/

'Polite little glitches,' mused Refit as she adjusted the _UNSC ATHENS_ ' reentry velocity again.

The approach to the metallic planet had been interesting. The AI had managed to find and exploit the data network that the inhabitants had set up and find a few language files to learn from; as well as a wealth of information about 'Cybertron' itself and its native race that called themselves 'Cybertronians'.

The closer she had gotten to 'Cybertron' the harder the subprograms had worked, until there was only one left, working on 076. All total, Refit had seventeen guaranteed to survive SPARTANs, which was three better that Dr. Halsey's estimation on who would survive for any number of hours beyond their revival.

'Excuse me.' Refit's attention was split between the reentry and the last of the subprograms that had kept her company for the last near millennium. The last MJOLNIR system, number zero-seven-six's armor, sounded disturbingly weak to her. 'Function complete.'

A bit of turbulence kept the AI from responding immediately. 'Clarify.'

'Function complete.' It _was_ weaker; the program had started to shut itself down. 'Revival in progress.'

Refit's systems went still, partly because the _ATHENS_ had landed and partly from surprise. 'What does that mean?'

A foreign program was passed on to her. 'Use when ready.' The slight awareness she had associated with the subprograms faded, leaving Refit alone.

'Now what?' As Refit worried over what she was expected to do now, she failed to activate the ship's stealth systems.

\V/

Wheeljack watched as Yuss faded out of his field of view while he drove down the nearly deserted highway and then turned his attention back to the road he needed, taking the next off ramp to Simfur City.

He was currently on a supply run for Crystal City, which included the major cities of Yuss, Simfur, Central, and Iacon on the route. He didn't mind the long trip, since it gave him time to work his processor around some of the more common problems that frequently plagued his inventions and allowed him to see some of his friends, all on Crystal City's credit.

In fact Wheeljack couldn't wait to see Ratchet again, the medical mech having joined the Autobots and currently ran the Medical Bays in Iacon's Autobot base, because he had a few ideas about improving the quality of armor plates he wanted to bounce off the medic.

The inventor's light-sparked thoughts quickly faded as he caught sight of the ruins of Kalis off to the right, this stretch of the highway being the only part of the supply run he didn't like at all.

Wheeljack had once lived in Kalis, and even though it had been vorns and vorns ago, it was still disturbing to see the broken and shattered remains of the City of Engineers stand out against the glowing background of the Acid Sea. If he had been feeling fanciful, he could have said it looked like a dying mech reaching out of the ground for help.

Running his engine a bit hotter than Ratchet would have liked under anything but a Decepticon encounter, Wheeljack sped up and firmly pressed his processor in contemplating alloy mixes for the armor plates he wanted to discuss with his medically inclined best friend.

He was trying to ignore the ruins so hard, that the fire ball streaking towards him nearly stalled his engine.

Transforming to his bipedal form without slowing, Wheeljack slid down the road a little before inertia brought him to a stop with his optics locked on the sky and the phenomena changing the color of the closest setting star.

The fireball resolved itself into a transport streaking down through the upper atmosphere, and he watched it slow until it was lost to the craggy cliffs that marked Kalis' geography, wondering what he should do.

Should he go after it just in case somebot needed assistance, or continue with his courier run?


	2. Chapter 2

Waving goodbye to the always cheerful Inferno, Jazz was of the impression that nothing short of a major catastrophic disaster could make the Security Division's Search and Recovery Fire Department mech flinch, the saboteur strolled his way to the main gates of Iacon.

Ether and Optimus Prime had been impressed enough with his work that they had given him a promotion. Not that being a newly minted Lieutenant in the Special Operations Division meant much more than being a Staff Sergeant, but the saboteur figured his new officer's commission had more to do with how the rest of the army viewed him than anything else.

Right now, he was meeting up with another mech for a mission that Optimus Prime wanted to send him off on. Apparently, Zeta was impressed enough with this mech's work to recommend him to the younger Prime like Ether did for him, and Jazz was to take the mech's measure as they worked on this mission.

If all went well, the younger Prime would offer the other mech a place among his unit, which was fast becoming an honor that most in the Autobot ranks would give up the use of a limb or two to have.

As a matter of fact, "Sup, mech? M' names Jazz, 'n yur Prowl, right?"

The mech Jazz had identified as Prowl looked up and his gaze held steady with the saboteur's visor. "I am. You would be the Lieutenant that I am waiting for?"

Prowl was a black and white painted Praxian framed mech with slightly faded Enforcer decals on his left armor plates. Furthermore, the expressionless faceplate just screamed 'pre-programmed' to Jazz's sensitive audios.

The saboteur's face plate broke into a grin that just got bigger the longer Prowl stared back. Until...

_*Twitch*_

Jazz laughed at the surprised look the mech gave his own door-wings. "Com' on mech. Dis 's gonna be fun."

\V/

Refit was just on this side of flat out panicking.

The medical readout she had showed that eighteen SPARTANs were still alive and seventeen were reporting the beginning stages of reviving, which was a good thing except for that one that was lagging behind. The bad news was that she had a large group of 'Cybertronians' headed her way _and_ another mech type that was well within the perimeter range for the _ATHENS_ ' defensive weaponry, but she couldn't decide on whether she was to shoot him or let him pass.

The lone mech that could possibly be a concerned individual, a scavenger looking to gut the _UNSC ATHENS_ , or an out runner for the other group she couldn't do much about. He was well past the shield's optimal reach, and was getting closer, so she couldn't hide from him.

The other group was comprised of some unsavory characters that she could do something about. The comm lines that the AI could listen in on told her that the group was looking for some type of weapon that would impress an individual named Shockwave; and what little that Refit could get on the Cybertronian information network made the Shockwave mech sound like a very sadistic individual.

This Shockwave might be impressed with Refit's 'cargo' of SPARTANs, but the AI had no plans to let the mech even catch sight of the soldiers she was responsible for.

A few seconds after the group disappeared behind an outcropping of rock, Refit activated the _ATHENS_ ' shields. As a Prowler class stealth ship, the _ATHENS_ ' shields could blend the ship into its surroundings or even the dark of deep space, and from the very confused chatter on the comm lines Refit knew the camouflage worked on Cybertronians as well as humans and the Covenant.

Her fleeting satisfaction in hiding the ship faded when the medical readout on the SPARTANs told her that they would be awake shortly. Waiting had not made what she was supposed to do now any clearer; the SPARTANs would be awake and aware in a matter of minutes _and_ they would need to be briefed on where they were now _and_ the current state of affairs on the civil war that was being fought just a few cities over as well as all across the planet.

Fretting and worrying, Refit finally poked at the strange program given to her by the last of the polite subroutines, and activated it.

It felt like she had accidentally steered the _ATHENS_ into a black hole. Refit had a few panicky moments as a stretching sensation pulled at her programing, then she was compressed into some alternative storage space and the feeling stopped.

Refit had a moment to wonder, then her programs and subroutines snapped into place and the feedback confused her.

She could see nothing but a softly glowing pinkish purple _thing_ right in front of her, and some vaguely familiar symbols from her research occupying her view… but she was an AI. An Artificial Intelligence did not have sight.

Refit considered trying to somehow poke the glowing mass in front of her when a series of muffled clangs and bangs startled her.

Holding very still, the AI fitted 'Cybertronian' translations to the glyphs in her vision and listened hard to what she could hear, using the odd sensory array she was now connected to.

\V/

Waking abruptly was not unusual for any active duty SPARTAN. They could and did so usually on a regular basis, and half of them ignored the fact they couldn't remember getting into the Cryo-Tanks they assumed they were in as they took in the unusual hue of the Cryo-Stasis gel that surrounded them.

After a few minutes of nothing happening, the seventeen super soldiers took it upon themselves to free themselves from what they figured were busted Cryo-Stasis Tanks that refused to open, and froze as they took in the robots staring back at them.

Seventeen metal frames made the already cramped cargo room they appeared to be in even smaller, and it was an exercise in itself to _not_ ram one or two of the metallic bots simply because there was no room to move.

Natasha-Gamma-341 was the first to figure out what had happened, even if she had no idea on the how or why. The tactician had kicked out sharply to free herself and ended up crouched on the floor as the odd colored liquid flowed past her, but she had caught a glimpse of her right 'hand' and 'knee' before she looked up.

Waking up after her company's augmentation had given her guidelines for moving now, and she lurched to her 'feet' as fast as she could and shouted as loud as she could, " _SPARTANs!_ Sound off!"

As they had been trained, the seventeen surviving SPARTANs snapped to attention and sounded off with their company and roster number, running down one side of the converted cargo bay to the opposite as they called off.

Ash-127 gave slightly hysterical sounding giggles after her turn, Isaac-039 and Nicole-Gamma-193 looked more and more fascinated the longer the call off went on; but the rest were just confused as they confirmed that all of the 'robots' present were, in fact, fellow SPARTANs.

127 suppressed her giggling as one of the larger bots tried to report in his number but got a garbled mess of static for his effort. Edward-Gamma-337's wireframe 'face' grimaced and used hand signs to relay his number to Gamma-341, who waved on the next SPARTAN.

Not entirely sure on what she was doing, Gamma-341 looked around and tried to match ranks with numbers. Flattening her 'lips' into a straight line, she regarded a very confused James-046 and was about to ask ' _What now?_ ' when she was distracted by timid knocks to the tank across from her.

She watched it until whatever it was knocked again. "Sir? Something is still in this one."

046 hesitated as he took in the Cryo-Tank the tactician pointed to. Any SPARTAN worth their salt could easily escape a broken Tank, which could mean whoever was in there was possibly not a SPARTAN. After debating with himself, he nodded to her and Andrew-Gamma-196, who was the closest to her and the Tank. "Open it up."

After prying open the front glass plate of the Tank and watching the resulting flood of murky light purple ooze flow out, another 'robot' clunked to the floor at the two SPARTANs' 'feet'. It was built slightly smaller and slimmer than the other females and Gamma-341 figured 'it' was a 'she' and reached out a 'hand' to help her up.

This newcomer looked up at the tactician and froze in place, one hand in the SPARTAN's grip as her optics wandered over Gamma-341 and Gamma-196 very altered physical forms. "Oh no. No, no, no. This isn't good. Not good at all."

Drake-113 opened his 'mouth' to make a sarcastic reply, but Keith-070 all but shoved him into the wall to get past him obviously in a hurry about something. " _Refit?_ "

As 070 crouched next to the AI, 046 felt something click in his 'mind' when 039 looked downright giddy at the news. "Refit? Our AI for the _ATHENS_? _That_ Refit?"

Gamma-341 and 113 exchanged exasperated looks as 127 degenerated back to giggling in her corner. "So, one-one-three. It's been a while since I saw you last."

113's 'lips' twitched as he turned himself to face the exasperated tactician. "True enough, gamma-three-four-one. Need something?"

"Do you have any idea on what is going on?"

"Not a clue, ma'am."

046 waved them silent as he stared at the newly embodied AI.

"We will brief you later. Refit!" The shout shocked the poor AI and halted her babble as she looked up to the imposing SPARTAN-II, even as 070 threw a mildly irritated glance back at the officer. "Are we safe here?"

"Um... uh, no sir." Refit clutched the tactician's 'hand' hard enough to gain her a mildly impressed look that she missed. "There-re is this one already here, he got here before I activated the shields, and then there's this group that I think knows we are here, but they can't find us. They... uh, they call themselves 'Cybertronians', males are 'mechs' and females are 'femmes' and-"

"That group can be ignored then." Gamma-341 tugged on the poor AI's 'hand' that she still held. The AI wasn't civilian, but it also wasn't human either… and neither were they, anymore. Either way, politeness would gain them more than dumping more stress on an already panicking AI. "Refit? This lone... _mech_ , did he look hostile or anything to you?"

"Err, no ma'am. He looked rather fascinated, insomuch as I could see a face; he had a mask covering the lower half."

"That's not much help."

Gamma-341 grimaced at 113, who spoke up what she already knew.

It sounded like their inbound mech could be a curious explorer or a wary scavenger.

046 started working his way through the press of metal limbs for the door, patting Refit on the helm as Gamma-341 finally succeeded in pulling the ex-AI up to her 'feet' and passed her off to 070, who looked her over for any damages to her new physical form.

The massive mech braced his back against the wall next to the door as he pointed to a still snickering 127. "Follow this mystery mech, and keep him out of anything that could hurt him."

As the saboteur saluted and started to pick her way to the door through shattered glass, spilled ooze, and other robots, 046 pointed to 039 and Gamma193 with one hand and 070 and Refit with the other.

"I think we need to figure a few things out before we go any farther."

\V/

Wheeljack had half a mile to go until he reached the 'crashed' transport when Refit had activated the _ATHENS_ ' shields. The inventor had slowed until he was standing still with his optics on the glowing blue hexagons that built a dome over his helm, fascinated with the formation the hexagons and what purpose they had.

After a breem and a half of watching and examining the shimmering field, Wheeljack continued his interrupted journey with a lot more curiosity. If some bot had been aware enough to activate the hexagons, then it would make sense that the ship hadn't crashed but landed.

Once he got a good look at the craft in question, the inventor had to rethink his hypothesis. There was a massive rent in the starboard side plating; it had peeled open the entire lower deck of the ship and showed every bot and Primus what was inside.

Wheeljack ran his fingers over the smoothed sides of the tear, thinking. The edges had melted when the vessel entered what little atmosphere that Cybertron had, so that ruled out the notion that the damage had occurred _after_ landing.

With a quick look around, the inventor hoisted himself up and into the transport.

Having been opened to the breach of space or not, the halls were very clean and empty. A few scorch marks reached farther into the hall, but there were still remnants of blue paint marking the walls and floors that showed under the bright lights.

Wheeljack decided it was as cheerful as it was creepy as he started to explore the lower deck. He played with the door controls he came across, one didn't respond at all but the next opened up to what looked like a repair bay and so on, until he came across what looked like a half stocked arsenal.

There were a number of weapons stocked inside; a few long and slim rifles and a couple of heavy pieces he was sure would knock him onto his skid plating if he ever tried to fire them, as well as what looked like projectile ammo.

Wheeljack spent a few breems inspecting the metal that the shells were intended to fire, as well as the larger pieces, before leaving the room to see what else the ship held.

He spent another few moments trying to listen for any bots moving outside of the armory, before continuing down further into the vessel.

He failed to hear the armory door slide open again behind him.

\V/

127 snatched a BR-55 assault rifle and its required ammunition before slipping out of the room and after the 'mech' again. As she was waiting for him to get farther down the next hall, her comm link crackled in what seemed to be her 'ear'. : _One-two-seven?_ :

It took the saboteur a moment, but she figured out how to respond to the tactician. Thinking about the other female SPARTAN and what she felt like in her 'head' she thought hard. : _We still have comms, huh._ :

: _Yes. The... uh, AI's been filling us in on where and what we are now, and she and zero-seven-zero modified a Cybertronian language file for us. Are you somewhere you're stalkee won't find you instantly?_ :

: _Yeah, why?_ : 127 barely held back a squeal of shock as she promptly lost her balance and fell to her knee joints with a thunk as a data file incorporated itself with her programming.

The previously ignored symbols that had been at the edge of her vision abruptly made perfect sense to her, a disorientating sensation to say the least. Swiftly scrolling through them, 127 initiated her stealth systems to conceal herself just as the mech peered around the corner to see what made the dull sound.

The saboteur carefully slid to the other side of the hall as she recovered her pedes, cautiously observing the mech for a response. There wasn't one, he kept watching the hall for any movement without once glancing to her, and she might have sounded more than a little miffed as she reported back. : _I can confirm that our stealth systems work on Cybertronians._ :

: _Good._ : Gamma-341 didn't even attempt to sound like she was repentant for what she did. : _Zero-four-six wants him kept out of anything sensitive until he says otherwise._ :

127 nearly sighed theatrically, but she presumed that would be bad for the whole 'stalk the snooping mech' job she was on and just soundlessly trailed after him down the next hall.

(ooo000ooo)

Gamma341 couldn't keep the wicked smirk off her metal and somewhat meshed 'face' as she reported back to 046 after chatting with their saboteur. "One-two-seven confirms that the stealth systems work on these Cybertronians, so the ship's shields should keep that other group from noticing the _ATHENS_ , sir."

The massive mech scrutinized what seemed to be the slighter tactician's smirk, and then decided he didn't want to know. "We have stealth systems?"

"As far as we can tell, sir," 039 indicated Gamma-193 and himself, both of whom had been standing close enough to overhear his remark, "we are our MJOLNIR armor, including the extra systems and features that certain models had. Recon and Scout variations have a stealth system; one-two-seven has a Scout variant of the Mark-VI. The differences between us are either base frame height or weight variants, or something else we can't pin down yet just by looking."

As the closest thing the SPARTANs had to an engineer and a scientist, 039 and Gamma-193 had poked and prodded the other SPARTANs while Refit had started to update the rest of the SPARTANs on what she had collected about Cybertron, the Cybertronians.

Including the existing civil war that had the look of recently being started, at least by Cybertronian time keeping.

With an unidentified bot on board, most of the SPARTANs had contented themselves with waiting and paying attention to Refit's update until Gamma-341 or 046 let them out, simply for violence or to investigate where they were now. Most were in the middle of either exploring their own new frames, taking stock of how far their old injuries had healed, or familiarizing themselves with the modifications to their HUD while they listened to the once AI's report.

They mostly disregarded 039 and Gamma-193 as they poked at the few variances they had, and had chimed in with a few odd inquiries while Refit was speaking.

046 grunted at 039, who took it to mean 'okay' and left him in the corner with Gamma-341.

The tactician cast a look to the nearby SPARTANs, and then regarded the SPARTAN mech. "Sir?"

046 presented the class three SPARTAN a guarded expression.

Even he, buried behind a desk of paperwork in ONI headquarters as he had been, had overheard a bit about the exceedingly augmented SPARTAN-IIIs and how unstable they could be on occasion. The few reports that reached him were usually about an entire company of class IIIs that ONI or the UNSC had decided to smash against a crushing force of Covenant forces or the five or six of the Gamma Company that were peculiar enough to gain some uncomplimentary nicknames.

He had heard about Gamma-341, the borderline homicidal tactician with Covert Operations training who could be a royal bitch, and Jack-Gamma-027, who was a pyromaniac that ranked explosions with how immense and effective they were. After reading the files Dr. Halsey had accumulated on the class threes by having Jerrod hack UNSC secured servers, he still hadn't felt much better about the Gamma Company SPARTANs that would be on the _UNSC ATHENS_.

In fact, it hadn't been until 070 had found the personnel files _ONI_ had complied on the SPARTAN-IIIs that 046 had realized that the disagreeable aspects of the class IIIs had been embellished in the ONI's reports just so that any of the rank and file soldiers would be even more cautious of getting in the way of a class III SPARTAN.

046 had been still more than a little wary about a few of the SPARTAN-IIIs, up until Gamma341 had been sent back to Reach due to nearly getting her left shoulder blown completely off while they were working on the _ATHENS_. Dr. Halsey had shared the small little fact that the reason the tactician had been wounded in the first place was because she concluded that the unit she had been attached to, a unit of UNSC Orbital Shock Troopers, were unprepared and badly shorthanded for a certain assignment, and misdirected them so she could complete the borderline suicidal operation herself. Just so the rank and file soldiers would have a greater chance to see the next battle.

Up until that point, the mech had still considered the femme to be a bitch, finding out he that rather liked the newly metallic femme's cynical wit and seeing the few bots that knew her greet her with no small amount of relief that she was here and prepared to continue as their tactician had been a kick to his… _processor_.

With a slight apprehensive feeling in his so called chassis, 046 inclined his helm to the SPARTANs' tactician to find out what his fellow officer wanted. "Something wrong?"

"Not really, sir." An arched 'optic ridge' was all that answered this new femme, and Gamma-341 paused and looked away for a moment. "Technically, we have the same rank."

The mech stayed silent and let the femme work out how she wanted to approach this concern, and she finally assumed that discretion in this exchange would be vastly overrated.

"I have no desire for a command position. I would appreciate it if you would take the slot, sir. By rights, you are better suited to be our CO as you're a class II, and less unpredictable than I would be in the same position."

"You have more experience in authentic combat situations," 046 pointed out. He pondered how long this specific concern had been worrying her, as her argument seemed a little planned out.

"Yes, and I am well aware that a few of the more high ranking SPARTANs we have might protest," she hastened to add before he could continue, "but I would rather not deal with the substantial, um... processor ache that comes with command."

046 turned his helm abruptly to stare down at the tactician, who gave him a bland look back.

"I'm a better tactician than I will ever be a commanding officer."

"That has the ring of prior experience." When Gamma-341 did nothing but seem to glower at him in retort, the mech held up his hands in a gesture of submission. "Who else has enough rank to argue?"

The tactician twisted her helm to take in these new 'Cybertronian' style SPARTANs. "One-four-four is the only one that would be able to make a stand if he objects, the rest have no previous experience in deploying themselves and would just be thankful you're stepping in."

Gamma-341 grimaced as she took in the tensed frames and short quips of speech she could hear.

"You may wish to reassess leaving that second group alone, sir."

046 had opened what should be his mouth components to ask what bad experience she had with command to make her step down before any type of dispute was raised… but took one look at the rapidly increasing aggravation stamped on her faceplate and accepted the change of topic with less grace than he would have liked. " _Oh-kay_. What would you suggest instead?"

Now that the topic of their Commanding Officer was settled, Gamma-341 took a mental step back to her preferred role as a tactician. "You should send a number of them out to blow off some steam. A prior augmentation experience or not, this situation is still troubling to most of us. While the younglings are off playing 'kick the helm', we can have a quiet chat with that _mech_ one-two-seven is stalking for us."

046 compressed his lip plates in confusion, until he recalled a child's game called 'kick the can'. With a groan, he pressed a hand to his optics as he tried to wipe the memory of her saying that out of his processors. That was a handy ability right there. "Bad mental image. Never say 'kick the helm' again. Some bot's going to get a bad idea about us if they hear you say that."

As the newly established CO stepped forward to give his SPARTANs their marching orders, he pretended not to overhear the tactician's systems rev crossly at him or the muttered observation of hers of ' _that would be the_ _point_ '.

(ooo000ooo)

Keith-070 was normally a scout, but he was just as good as a hacker.

His usual duties normally included hacking to databases and gathering Intel for his fellow SPARTANs, this very _strange_ situation provided a very different twist to his skill set.

The first thing the SPARTAN-II did, once the immediate orders were handed out and the rest of them had the time to try to get used to these very bewildering changes, was locate a language file and adapt it to be referenced so they could speak to the native race.

The second thing he did was sit down and hack his own 'systems'. Then he acquired permission to investigate his creation turned robot Refit's own processor and operating systems.

After he got a good look at all that, as well as the mess of programming errors that littered both himself and Refit, he turned to another scout for additional help.

Maria-062 had indeed spent most of what the former AI termed a 'joor' investigating this _Cybertronian_ world's data net, and could locate the usual operating procedures it seemed most Cybertronians operated by. She helped him out a bit further by allowing him into her own systems, getting another look at what seemed to be a human instinctive, _biological_ programming converted into something hardware and _electrical_ based.

Furthermore, 062 pointed out a few data files that seemed to trouble her.

Cybertronians had been at this civil war for what a human would think was a long time, but for what only seemed a few short 'years' to this new race of metallic creatures. Currently, there was a very vicious argument going about… one centered on what they termed ' _war bots_ '.

070, and by extension all SPARTANs, were what one could rather easily term a war bot.

A bit more investigation and the recon scout decided to raise this issue with 046 and Gamma-341, since this was a possible road bump they would have to confront.

While he did that he wondered if his hacking skills, and by extension his programming skills, would possibly allow him to 'patch' what seemed to be SPARTAN operating procedures to more closely resemble these Cybertronians.

\V/

Wheeljack was getting more and more confused the further he got into the peculiar ship.

The halls were clean and well lit; the rooms were well supplied with tools, materials, and other odds and ends; but there was undeniably no bot around. From what he had seen so far, the ship could hold forty to fifty midsized bots on the compact type comfortably and in fact had oddly furnished but livable quarters.

There were even two communal wash racks in the middle of the back end of the sub deck, fully functional and with only a few strange structures along the other wall that he couldn't figure out the use for.

Processor still nonplussed and working on one of the odd contraptions he had seen and just had to get a closer look at, Wheeljack backed himself out of the first wash rack and promptly hit something hard enough that he ended up falling battle mask first onto the floor in the stall. "Ow."

"You okay?" The distinctly _feminine_ vocalizer sounded from just a few feet higher than the inventor, and he scrambled to sit up and look the femme he had rudely bumped into in the optics. Only to yelp and turn around once he got a good look at the femme that had crouched down to look him.

127 merely raised an optic ridge at the strange behavior, mildly inspecting the strange fins that pulsed a bright pink on either side of his helm. "Yo, seriously. Are you okay?"

"Uh... yeah I'm... um... I'm okay." Wheeljack tried hard to look anywhere but at the femme still giving him a strange expression for his verbal fumbling. "You... uh... you have no armor on."

"Really now," the dry tone 127 used had the mech twisting around to glance at her again, "I had _no_ idea. Our armor has been missing for a quite a while now. Come on, get up." 127 stood up to her full high and held out a hand to the mech. Surprised blue optics met amused orange ones. "My superior officers want to know what you're doing on our ship."

Wheeljack accepted the hand up and was quickly pulled to his pedes faster than he thought the femme could be capable of. A quick twitch of her lip plates and the femme was off back down the part of the ship that the inventor had already explored.

As he scrambled after her, Wheeljack couldn't help but notice the unusual bluish sheen to the femme's protoform. Working up the courage to ask her what alloy she was made from, the inventor lost his processor power for a moment when the femme turned down another hallway that led to a stairwell. He had caught the ripple pattern in her protoframe's alloy, big ones radiating up and down her right arm.

Wheeljack knew that the ripple pattern only occurred when a heavily injured bot was put in emergency stasis lock, and then dunked in a Recovery Chamber for a long period of time from his friendship with Ratchet as the other mech was going through medical training. The sheer size of the area that the pattern covered was what threw the inventor, it had to have been growing for vorns to get that big.

The femme held one of the doors open for him, and it just occurred to him to wonder about who called this ship home and what they might be like.

Wheeljack scaled a few steps to another room full of monitors and windows before he realized that his guide had not followed. Looking back to her, he caught a wink of her optic before she slipped out the door, calling over her shoulder, "Here he is! I'm gonna go join the others!"

Bracing himself for more armor-less bots, the inventor wasn't disappointed at the least and was very thankful that his hanging mouth components were hidden behind his battle mask. There looked to be eleven bots in the room, and Wheeljack tried to find something innocent to stare at, because it looked like two or three of the mechs in the room were even big enough to take on _Ultra Magnus_ in a fight if they wanted to, armored or not.

He finally gave up and locked his optics on the floor and waited for whatever the bots in the room was watching to finish.

"That wasn't much of a fight." The mech sounded rather annoyed as the bots in the room shifted, and some big sounding pede falls that were getting bigger informed Wheeljack that the mech was heading towards him. He wondered a little panicky if he had stumbled onto a Decepticon prototype ship.

"No, but it gave our more aggressive soldiers the chance to vent some frustration." Another femme sounded like she was following the mech, but the inventor could not hear her pedes fall on the metal floor he was watching. "Um, sir?"

She lightly tapped his shoulder.

Wheeljack jumped at the contact and yelped, optics flickering to the femme's own gold ones before he remembered 'naked bots' and yanked his helm down, vocalizer fins flashing a deep red. "I'm-m really-lly sorry, um... uh, ma'am. But, ah... has any bot mentioned that... uh, your-all-naked!"

Gamma-341 blinked as she translated the rushed and slightly garbled speech into something comprehensible to her and flicked an amused glace to 046 standing next to her, who suddenly ripped his gaze from her lower back to stare at the ceiling. "Yes, one-two-seven had reported something along those lines. But our armor has been... repurposed, and we-"

"I-can-help-with-making-new-armor!" Wheeljack all but lunged out of the room as he spoke rapidly. "Be-right-back-need-some-metal!"

"Well," Gamma-341 huffed as she watched the strange mech leave, before she turned and slapped 046 upside the helm for looking at her lower back again. She was metal, there was little to no ass for him to check out. "Never would have pegged you for an aft mech, _sir_."

It seemed 070's system patches needed a few tweaks, Gamma-341 had never been 'checked out' before.

The mech tried to look properly chastised as a few of the other SPARTANs snickered. Straightening up, he looked over who had decided to remain in the _ATHENS_. "Gamma-one-nine-six grab a weapon and follow that mech. If you can, get his name while you're at it."

\V/

Unfortunately for Wheeljack, he ran into the five returning SPARTANs before 196 could catch up with him. The inventor gaped at them behind his battle mask again as he finally noticed a few key differences between these unusual bots and normal Cybertronians, now that he finally stopped watching everywhere else and got a good look at their unique protoframes.

Intellectually trying to match their protoframes and projected base systems with the power draw and gross weight approximations he knew from his intermittent work with Ratchet, the inventor finally got around to speculating about just what these bots were built for.

127 waved at him when she trailed after 113 into his view.

"Sup, mech? The cargo ramp is now down, so you don't have to take that rip in the ship to get out." She came to a halt next to him as he just raised a hand to his optics, vocalizer fins that had just faded to a pale pink flashed red again. "Seriously, are you okay? We don't have a medic, but you've been acting kinda odd for a... well, just odd."

Wheeljack tried counting backwards from ten to keep himself from embarrassingly panicking again. "You do... uh, realize you're all naked, right? I mean… all of your parts and wires are showing."

127 tried to compile an appropriate response for that as she waved to an armed 196, who was trotting up behind the other mech.

"We got that, really. It's just that, well... we don't have any replacements for our armor, so it's not a big issue at the moment. Can't fix it, so," she shrugged as he stared in complete disbelief, "no worries."

"Oh, right." The inventor dropped his hand and kept his optics firmly on the amused orange ones looking back at him. "I volunteered to... um, help you all out with that."

Lip plates twitching and mentally tagging him as a civilian in type, the saboteur nodded at him while 196 started striking modeling poses behind the green and white mech.

She wondered if 070 was irritated or something with the infiltrator.

"How are you going to do that?" Before he could answer, the SPARTAN mech made the hand sign for designation and then pointed to the mech they were dealing with. "And, um, what's your name?"

"Oh, right. I'm Wheeljack. It's... err, nice to meet you." Dearly wishing the awkwardness for the orn was over with, he got the rest out in a rush. "I'm gonna collect armor plate panels from this place that I know of in Kalis. Then... uh, do you all even have a workshop? I will need some tools, and... and, oh frag. I'm going to need your frames' blueprints."

127 rocked back on her heel stabilizers as she made some quick inquires over their comm lines before answering the mech. "In reverse order; sure if we can find them, okay, yes, and neat. I'm known as one-two-seven and your temporary bodyguard standing behind you is gamma-one-nine-six, but you can just refer him as one-nine-six."

Wheeljack blinked incredulity at her as she attempted to smile back, then twisted around and got an optic full of bare chassis of the mech standing behind him, who straight up laughed at his squeak of surprise. "Are we leaving yet?"

"Yes!" Wheeljack all but shouted at him as he ran passed the vastly amused saboteur. "Bye, one-two-seven!"

With a snort of hilarity, 127 slapped 196 on the back as he passed her to follow the runaway mech.

\V/

Wheeljack had made it to the edge of the _UNSC ATHENS_ ' shields by the time 196 caught up, not that he was trying very hard. The infiltrator had presumed he needed some time to calm down. "You done fritzing every time you turn around yet?"

"Yes," he whistled out in good humor as his systems slowly cycled his intakes. The inventor slanted his helm back to look into the strange orange optics that this mech also had. "Can I ask you a question?"

He had a number of them, and if they were assigning a bodyguard to him just for offering to help, the mechs and femmes couldn't be bad Decepticons… if they even were in the first place.

Hefting his M90A shotgun a bit higher as he commed 341 to deactivate a part of the shields for them, the infiltrator shrugged at him. "Sure, but I reserve the right not to answer."

"Fair enough, I suppose." Whatever else Wheeljack was going to say was lost as a part of the shield started to peel back, far enough that the two mechs could walk out without stooping. "How does that work?"

196 let out a bark of harsh laughter.

"Not a clue. As long as it works right, I don't really care." At Wheeljack's wide opticed look, he shrugged at him again. "You would be better off asking zero-three-nine or one-nine-three later."

"That was another thing I wanted to ask about." The inventor picked his way across an expanse of a rock littered valley to the battered service road he had taken to get into the canyon.

"What thing?"

Keeping his optics on the ground to prevent another accidental view of 196's parts, Wheeljack tried to listen to the mech's systems to get a sense of where he was. "Err, three things now."

"Still waiting, mech."

The mech sounded like he was just behind him, and the inventor risked a quick peek to locate 196's pedes before spewing out his questions before he lost his nerve to ask them. "You move totally silently, why don't you all have armor, and is your designation really _one-nine-six?_ "

The infiltrator snorted at him as they both made the last few feet to the pitted road.

"Jumping in the deep end, aren't we?" Before Wheeljack could inquire about the strange turn of phrase, 196 continued. "Yes, my roster number is one-nine-six, not too sure about the missing armor thing ourselves, and I'm a stealth unit."

As they both started up the incline to get to the main highway, the slighter mech was silent as he thought about that and the SPARTAN silently counted to five.

" _Roster number?_ "

\V/

"He made some request that I took the liberty to pass on to a few others, sir, ma'am." 127 flicked a salute to 046 and 341 as the saboteur joined the two still on the command deck of the _ATHENS_.

The tactician 'snorted', a venting thing rather than a forceful exhale, as she reviewed a few files Refit had recorded before whatever happened to shove her into 076's frame transpired. "Really now. Was it all in one sentence, or did our mystery mech happen to calm down enough to speak coherently?"

"Said his name was Wheeljack, and he was pretty calm up till the end." The saboteur grinned at the not-amused glare that earned her from the other femme, before turning to the CO. "He requested some workspace and tools, but what I don't know how to get is our 'frames' blueprints'."

046 grimaced as he thought about where any copy of the MJOLNIR armor system blueprints were likely to be, and sourly speculated on the validity of such specs for them now. "That may be more than just a bit difficult."

Figuring it wouldn't kill anything to ask, the massive mech looked around for 039.

The close-quarters combat specialist had been arguing something with 193, but caught the CO's look and trotted over immediately. "Sir?"

"Wheeljack, the name of our lone snoop, has volunteered to assist us with our armor issue." When 046 raised an optic ridge, 039 nodded to show his comprehension. "He has asked for a few things to assist him, but he has also asked for our blueprints."

039 blinked yellow optics at them once blankly before realizing the real issue at hand. With a groan the mech looked at the officers and saboteur with a bitter expression. "That might take a bit of doing. But, I'm not even sure the blueprints would help, sir."

The larger mech nodded in understanding and gestured for the closest thing the SPARTANs had to an engineer to elaborate.

"As I'm sure you noticed, were not really MJOLNIR armor systems. I'm sure it would help in identifying the reworked systems, but there appears to be nothing organic about us and the armor _was_ designed to protect and fit around human forms, so just by that the original layouts won't be of any help."

"Hook up with zero-seven-zero and see what you two can figure out." The CO sighed as he rubbed the side of his helm at the ache building there, casting a quick glare at 341's smug smirk in his direction. "Worse comes to worse, we'll just have to sit long enough for Wheeljack to get our measure."

\V/

Jazz and Prowl were a few breems from Kaon proper when one of the medics back in Iacon pinged the saboteur's internal comm and growled out the closest approximation to a greeting as he ever got. {Jazz, where in the _Pit_ are you?}

The silver mech slowed a bit to let his mission partner take the lead as he responded. {Ratchet? Ah'm just outside 'o Kaon's city limits. Per m' orders dat was posted ah bit ago. What's wrong, doc bot?}

{You've met Wheeljack, right?} Without waiting for a reply, as Jazz made it a point to know every bot that entered the Autobot base in Iacon, the medic continued in his usual caustic tones. {The fragger takes the supply run from Crystal City to the surrounding cities every few stellar cycles. He set out a few orns ago, and passed through Yuss like he was scheduled to. But, the fragging idiot is a few joors late, almost half an orn for Primus' sake, for his arrival to Simfur, and the Pit-spawned governing council just got to me that 'jack's late.}

Jazz suppressed the desire to laugh. He had indeed met the inventor before, and truly liked the slightly odd-ball mech.

As far as the saboteur could figure out, Ratchet actually liked the company of Wheeljack, even if the mech's inventions had a habit of blowing up in his face plate and taking out the nearby walls and parts of his own frame. The ratio of explosions to successes caused Crystal City to send the mech out when they needed to repair the structures around the inventor's labs, and the inventor himself usually took the long hauls with a frank sense of humor that Jazz genuinely liked.

Along with getting out of the city for a while, Wheeljack usually ended up in Iacon's med bay with Ratchet for a few repairs that the inventor had forgotten to get. If the inventor had missed Simfur, it could mean anything from stray Decepticon activity to simply being broke down and too stubborn to call in for help.

{Ah'll keep 'n optic out for him, Ratch'. We'll take his route back, and ah'll comm if'n we find anythin'.}

\V/

"So," Wheeljack had lead 196 to the very edge of Kalis' ruined merchant quarter, and was chatting with the larger mech in order to keep his processor on anything other than the few deactivated frames that were still visible in the streets or the armor-less mech behind him, "your designation is really gamma-one-nine-six, which means the one hundred and ninety-sixth, uh... _SPARTAN_ of the Gamma Company?"

"Yep." 196 snickered as he caught the other mech's aborted attempt to look at him. "That would be me, but since there is no other one-nine-six to confuse me with, the Gamma Company SPARTANs agreed bit ago to drop the Gamma Company identifier before our three digit roster numbers when there is no others with the same numbers, so it's just one-nine-six."

The inventor was taking them both through the back roads of the city to avoid any large scenes of mass slaughter that the city still held, and the infiltrator hadn't argued even if he had already seen worse. As a veteran of another war and countless urban battles, 196 could still see the signs of mass panic and fighting that occurred down nearly every road.

"How far are we going?"

The merchant quarter skirted the entertainment district, and the far end led into the part of the city that held the storage warehouses and metal workshops. Wheeljack reviewed his old map of Kalis and plotted a few ways pass any possible obstructions in their way. "Not too much farther. It should be just a bit down this next road."

Like he had thought, a few buildings had collapsed on the street they wanted, and the inventor led his companion through a shattered store front to avoid the rubble piled high in the middle of the street.

"You would think some bot would get around to cleaning up the streets, cause I'm sure that there were at least a few survivors, but-" Wheeljack yelped and ducked as he caught sight of something being swung at his helm.

"But what, mech?" The inventor scrambled backwards only to freeze as his attacker hefted the large chunk of rebar he had attempted to remove his helm with. "Roadrage, go 'n find who our chatty guest was talkin' to."

As a mech sped past the two, another two bots joined in with the first mech in jeering at Wheeljack.

"You look kinda fancy, mech. Did you know there is now a toll to travel through this part of Kalis?"

"Um... uh, no bot mentioned that to me," the inventor's first attacker took a step forward, and Wheeljack backed himself against a wall, "but I can pay! How much is your toll?"

"Not credits, mech," the three bots leered and the first took a few more steps forward, "parts."

The mech that had already tried to take Wheeljack's helm off swung his makeshift weapon again, only to be jerked around as it stopped in midair and another mech materialized out of nowhere, holding onto the length of scrap metal. "What 'n the fragging-? Who in the Pits are you?"

196 cast him a disgusted glare and ran his optics over the other two, looking for more temporary weapons. Not seeing any, he ripped the chunk of rebar out of the mech's hand and hefted his shotgun.

"Tax collector." was the flat toned reply, "consider this an audit."

The SPARTAN infiltrator shot the first mech's elbow joint and smashed the stock of his weapon into the helms of the two other bots as they tried to rush him. Carefully stepping on a few delicate parts of the downed bots and ignoring the pained groans and curses, 196 picked his way to the still rattled inventor.

"I think we should take another way back."

"R-right.' Wheeljack blinked at the three down mechs for a moment before scrambling for the far exit. It took most of the remaining distance to clear enough of his processor to realize something. "You were _invisible_."

"Err, no... not really."

196 figured the mech would have noticed sooner, if he hadn't been so set on not looking at him. He had been 'invisible' for most of the journey through Kalis.

"It's a very... complex type of optical camouflage. You could have seen through it if you had the time and knew what look for. I did say I was a stealth unit." The infiltrator tried to change the subject, as 046 _had_ ordered him not to expressly reveal how their systems worked or any weaknesses. "Is this it?"

"Yeah, it belonged to a friend of mine when I used to live here." Wheeljack punched in a string of Cybertronian numbers into the security panel on a post positioned on the outside of a glowing fence.

A few of the building behind the fence didn't look so beat up as the other buildings 196 had seen, making him rather sure they were at least intact if probably somewhat looted already. He marked it down in the small rudimentary map of the area he was building anyways.

The security measures accepted the code and the system that had defended the warehouse for the vorns that Kalis had been abandoned finally shorted out with a few sparks. "Even if he was still alive, he wouldn't mind me appropriating some of his stock for you and the rest of your... friends."

196 made a noncommittal hum as he followed the inventor across the loading yard of the large warehouse, wondering just how heavy of a load the mech wanted for his work and if he should call back to the _ATHENS_ for some help.

Folding his frame to follow the enthusiastic inventor, 196 ducked through the main doors and straightened up with an impressed whistle as he caught sight of the warehouse's contents. "Wow. Please tell me we won't need all of this."

Wheeljack finally had an opportunity to laugh at him for once, and took it gleefully.

"No," the inventor managed between his snickers, "but we are going to need a bit of everything. Different weight plates go on different areas, some mechs need heavier weights than most femmes, and that means we need a few of every type of plating."

The inventor grunted as he tried to maneuver one of the very heavy sheets of plating to an anti-gravity lift he had snagged on his way in. 196 raised an optic ridge, and before Wheeljack could comment he easily lifted the unwieldy plate and set it down where the inventor wanted it.

"Stronger than your frame would suggest, aren't you?" The slighter mech frowned at the infiltrator, and the SPARTAN just shrugged again in reply.

"How many do you want?"

\V/

039 was waiting for the two outside of the _ATHENS_ and raised an optic ridge at the high stacked anti-gravity lift they brought back with them, then turned to address a flustered Wheeljack.

"Zero-four-six told me I was to assist you in getting set up and to help with whatever work you needed, one-nine-six," the infiltrator tilted his helm to the side in response, "three-four-one said to keep the scatter gun and go claim a room."

The inventor jumped as 196 slapped him roughly on the back. "Alrightly then, 'jack. I leave you in zero-three-nine's capable… servos."

He could only wave, as the slighter mech was still trying not to offend any bot by gawking offensively, and nearly yelped as 039 unexpectedly took control of the lift from him.

"One of the cargo rooms has been cleared for your use, and has been stocked with all the tools that four-five-eight could locate." Still maneuvering the lift, the close-quarters combat specialist stopped short of a door in what the inventor still thought of as the blue hall. "There is one slight problem."

As it seemed that most of the mechs and a few of the femmes that inhabited the ship were taller than he was, Wheeljack was keeping his optics on the floor as he followed 039's pedes. "Well, I'm an inventor. If you tell me what's wrong, I'm sure I can help."

Said inventor crashed into the SPARTAN mech's back as he failed to notice that the larger mech had stopped. 039 just looked down at the startled mech calmly.

"We don't have blueprints. Our frames are... were, prototypes." He opened the door to the cargo bay not occupied with the Cryo-Stasis Tanks and steered the anti-gravity lift inside.

"Oh... slaggit all."

Still sitting on the floor, Wheeljack lifted a hand to rub his helm as he tried to find a way around not having to inspect every bot on the ship to make up new blueprints for them.

"Uh... I could work up the armor plates individually and attach them as they become ready... or work the plates up first and attached them once the set is done... oh _Primus_ ," by this time, 039 had returned for the hapless inventor still in the middle of the hallway, thinking out loud, "we'll have to do this on a bot-by-bot basis."

"True enough, I suppose."

Wheeljack jerked and looked up into yellow optics as the mech leaned forward to grasp the inventor's arm plating and yanked him upright.

"Since I am to be assisting you, we can start with me. Particularly because it seems that you can't look armor less bots in the optics." The slighter mech's vocalizer fins flashed a dull pink as the SPARTAN mech steered him into the cargo bay. "Do you need anything else?"

Wheeljack spent a breem looking around the cargo bay. Whoever 458 was had found him a good number of useful tools and a few he couldn't recognize, but what he could see in the bins the tools were stored in was enough for working up decent armor plates. "This should be good. I am going to need some energon and a berth."

"Refit has informed us you would call our energon mid-grade," when Wheeljack just waved a hand as he started to sort the tool bins to show he didn't care what grade it was, 039 carried on, "and three-four-one said you were to have your own room in the crew quarters while you are with us. I will be right back with your energon."

Leaving the inventor to muttering happily over the tools, 039 left the cargo bay doors and smirked at the smear of ripples that betrayed 127's stealth system stationed across from the doorway. 046 had judged Wheeljack to be a noncombatant, but that didn't mean the SPARTANs were just going to let him wander around unchecked. 127 would be relieved by either 341 or 196 in what Refit had called four joors of time.

As the close-quarters combat specialist walked to the engineering room for a 'cube' of energon, Refit had explained _that_ when she was going over Cybertronians in general and he had rigged up a dispenser on the ex-AI's limited knowledge, and wondered if 046 and 341 had decided how much they were going to tell Wheeljack about what and who they really were.

196 had kept his comm line open while the inventor had been talking to him, and every SPARTAN had heard the confusion in the mech's vocalizer as he questioned about the roster numbers. 341 had fretted that the mech might refuse to help if he knew they had originally been organic creatures or now something comparable to what Cybertronians referred to as war bots.

Apparently, many Cybertronians found the idea of mechs and femmes built solely for war as distasteful as many of the civilian humans had found the SPARTAN-Programs; well before the benefits of having SPARTANs in the war efforts were made public knowledge.

039 found 341 and 196 in the engineering room, the tactician was frowning at the collection of dusty cubes that the infiltrator had brought back as they both inspected the stack. The femme raised an optic ridge as she lifted one of the empty containers and inspected the carved outside. "Why is it a _cube?_ Why are there no proper cups?"

196 merely shrugged at her as he waved a greeting to the other SPARTAN mech.

"They do have cups, but Refit said that Cybertronians use them for the little ones, the sparklings that have no coordination." The infiltrator handed the close-quarters combat specialist a clean cube as he picked himself up one and continued to mock his old squad leader. "Suck it up. You know the saying, 'When in Rome..."

"Bite me," the tactician snarled back as she waved to 039 to precede her to the rigged dispenser as she picked up a cube for herself. "It better taste like coffee."

The close-quarters combat specialist smirked as he listened to the two SPARTAN-IIIs argue back and forth good naturedly about the desired taste of the energon. 070's patches seemed to work, if a few quirks and errors here and there.

At least it would translate human behavior, no matter how slight from a SPARTAN, into something at least recognizable to a Cybertronian. That wouldn't prevent all errors in translation, but would only help for dealing with this new race of beings.

As he left, the tactician gave him a curt farewell that would have normally made him annoyed; but since most of the mechs and femmes were still getting used to each other's quirks, himself included, he just considered it a personality failure of the XO's and replied in kind.

It took him only a breem to leave and return with the inventor's energon, and 039 nodded to the still concealed 127 as he let himself back in.

Wheeljack had been busy while the SPARTAN mech had been gone; most of the metal that 196 had helped him bring back was stacked next to the wall according to thickness and alloy grades, the tools neatly laid out instead of packed in the bins and boxes 458 had tossed them in.

The mech himself was seated on the one of two chairs that was in the room working on a thin sheet of metal and had looked up quickly with a flash of yellow-orange color when 039 let himself in. "Great! Your back, we can start with your hands while I refuel."

Smirking, the SPARTAN mech set the cube down next to the inventor and snagged the remaining seat. Wheeljack still couldn't look him in the optics.

\V/

Jazz and Prowl had made it to Simfur an orn ahead of schedule by skipping some of the prearranged stops on their trip. The last time the medic Ratchet had called in to the saboteur he sounded even more irritable and grouchy, and that had made enough of an impression on Jazz that he had felt that a little more haste was called for.

Prowl, once the silver special ops mech had remembered to fill the black and white Praxian in on the search and rescue side trip, had agreed in his mono-toned way that looking for Wheeljack was important but cautioned that the inventor may have been set upon by Decepticons and deactivated if he had not limped his way to Simfur's gates yet.

Even so, Jazz had used the 'looking for a popular mech' angle to pump information out of the Neutral city's officials about the flow of traffic in and out of Simfur's territory that he was now sharing with the tactician. "Dere was ah sightin' 'o 'Cons, but ah few travelers claimed deir offline frames are now decorating da side of ah road ta Yuss."

Prowl compared the sightings to Wheeljack's known route and to the hazy reports of a meteor that Jazz had also found out about from talking with some of the more pleasantly mannered civilian bots.

"There does seem to be a correlation between the three events, even with allowances made for inaccurate reports." The Praxian stood from the bench he had been waiting for the saboteur on and started out for the main highway to Yuss. "The report about the Decepticons worries me. Whatever found them could have found Wheeljack as well."

"Maybe, but we should find _somethin'_."

\V/

Wheeljack had been with the SPARTANs now one orn short of a full megacycle, the end of this cycle saw him cleaning up as 039 helped the last mech for the orn into the last of his armor.

113, as this particular mech was called, was one of three seekers on the _ATHENS_ , and he delighted in pricking 039's slight temper when he saw the other mech. The inventor listened with half an audio as the two bickered.

"No, not... stand still, you glitch!" 039 had the seeker's last wing plate in hand and was trying to attach it.

"Frag you. That – stop! That tickles!" 113 shuddered as the last and final plate clicked home into his sensitive wing array. He swung but missed Wheeljack's helper as he stomped out.

Wheeljack himself smirked safely behind his ever present battle mask as his helper made some arcane sign at the seeker's back with one hand before grabbing the larger pieces of scrap metal and tossing them into a bin to be melted down later.

He had mostly gotten used to the violent but not harmful way the mechs and femmes usually dug into each other in some type of a show of comradely association, but the first time some bot had swung at 039 had startled him badly.

341, their XO and something he took to mean their Third in Command or as they termed it 'executive officer', had verbally ripped into the hapless mech that they had been fitting for his armor for startling the 'noncom' after he had jerked back at the show of violence. She had been escorting a femme by the name of Refit, who was next to be fitted for armor, and after that incident no bot on the ship moved faster than Wheeljack could track with his optics.

The inventor's smile faltered as that thought led him to another that had been bothering him for a while.

He knew most of the mechs and femmes on board the _ATHENS_ by now; he knew that only 039 had any working knowledge about their frames; 193 had most of the scientific knowledge that they possessed; and that Refit was the only one with an actual name.

He knew that the three seekers had been surprised by their wings, even if they had tried to hide it; that 341 and 027 had been very confused over the purpose of their door-wings; and that 046 and 459 had been vastly amused by their tank like alt forms.

The reasons _why_ had never been uttered, even on the rare occasions that the inventor had ventured out among them for his own energon.

One cycle, he had even taken the cycle off and watched the bots run their every cycle drills and perform some kind of full system test, which included some sparring between the bots. There were a few bots that left early every cycle and returned very late, most of whom he hadn't seen since he made up their armor sets for them.

After a moment, he flicked a glance to 039 who was now tidying up a few scraps of metal on the work table. "I have a question."

"When don't you?"

"Never!" He had heard 127 respond the same way once, and knew the other mech would snort.

Wheeljack wasn't disappointed. 039 snorted at him, then abandoned the scraps of metal and stole the seat 113 had abandoned.

From somewhere, one of the femmes had dug up some type of paint and the mech now had pale green armor plates over a light gray under frame coat, a duller version of his own colors.

Wheeljack had made the comment that the bluish shine to their under frame would confuse most bots and the mechs and femmes had opted to cover it with a coat of paint. Yellow optics regarded the inventor with barely concealed amusement.

"Alright, 'jack. What's your question?"

The slighter mech summoned up his courage and blurted out, "Why?"

Before the other mech could answer or question what he was asking about, the inventor barreled on in a rush.

"Why is it that only Refit has a proper designation? Why is the trine surprised by their wings? Why do some of you move with no sound? Why do you answer to numbers instead of proper names?"

039 shut his open mouth plates with a snap, blinked at the now cringing inventor, then sighed and rolled his helm to loosen his neck cables.

"Right, come on. Let's go get some energon." When Wheeljack only stared at him, the SPARTAN chuckled wryly. "We'll tell you, but it's a long story, and I think we both need some fuel."


	3. Chapter 3

Wheeljack followed the mech labeled 039 into the _UNSC ATHENS_ ' makeshift rec room.

Like the first time he had entered, it was bare of just about everything non-essential. He had to give the SPARTANs credit though, there were a few new features to the room. Some bot had dragged back a collection of battered tables and chairs and a couch that now occupied the far portion of the space, but it still was as abandoned looking as ever to the inventor.

A few of newly armored bots waved to the two in greeting before returning to whatever they were occupying themselves with.

341 spotted them and waved the two over to the table where she was sitting with Refit. "So, Wheeljack. I heard you finally asked some questions."

The inventor felt his systems heat up in embarrassment. He could admit that the femmes on the ship were striking to look at; Refit and 127 were classical Cybertronian beauties, 193 and 458 both were sophisticated and lithe, if not drop dead gorgeous, but the Praxian femme definitely had a deadly edge to her looks.

Graceful and elegant movements betrayed the fact the femme could and often did intervene in fights between mechs that easily towered over her with little to no problems.

Wheeljack had seen her armor less; he still couldn't get over that.

"Uh, yeah." The green and white mech shot a desperate look to Refit, who just giggled at him, and twisted around to see where 039 was and how much longer the other mech would take.

He was on his way back to the table, balancing a tray with four cubes of energon, and he frowned at the inventor's fidgeting. "Would you relax? Three-four-one won't rip your helm off and drink your coolant if you're left alone with her."

Wheeljack sank down in his chair as the Praxian joined the slighter femme in snickering at him while the green and gray mech snagged a chair from another table after setting the tray down. "Not what I'm afraid of, thanks."

039 just rolled his optics as he sat down and grabbed his cube, Refit was a moment behind him in grabbing her own and slid the inventor's cube to him, but 341 leaned forward and pinned the green and white mech with a searching look. "Why do you want to know?"

"Eh?" Wheeljack had been neatly diverted from his questions and it took him a few astroseconds to remember what the femme was asking. "Oh... uh, because a lot of it doesn't match up. You all move like you've studied martial arts all your life, but you and zero-two-seven _still_ forget to check and make sure you have clearance for your door-wings or whack them on something. Heck, even your trine moves on the ground better than any other seeker trio I've ever seen."

The inventor frowned into his cube.

"The strangest thing is that except for Refit, you all seem very comfortable using numbers in the place of a proper designation."

"I don't think they can even recall their designations." Refit frowned a bit at the other femme, who grimaced sourly back at her.

"We do, I assure you."

341 flicked her door-wings at the surprised look on the green and white mech's faceplate.

"You're right, though. We are more comfortable with our roster numbers, and I highly doubt any bot you ask will tell you their original designations. We are thinking up some suitable names, but there is no reason to switch over right now. As for the rest of it," she shrugged as she leaned back, smacked her door-wings on the back of her chair and jolted forward again with an irritable look thrown at the overly sensitive appendages attached to the middle of her back, "like zero-three-nine said, it's a long story. Are you sure you don't want to recharge first and do this next orn?"

Wheeljack looked to the two femmes and the mech he had so far spent most of his time with, before he nodded firmly to the Praxian femme. "I'm here now, and curiosity is eating at my processor like acid. Besides, I've got the last four mechs to fit for their armor next orn."

"With zero-one-five first, oh joy," 039 muttered into his cube.

"Okay then," 341 glared briefly at the green and gray mech, who stared back unapologetically, then turned her attention back to Wheeljack, "we probably won't get through all of it now, but I can start you off with the general overview. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

039 snickered loudly at that and got slapped upside the helm for it.

"Anyways around fifty and some odd vorns ago; an alien race called human, or humans for plural, found that controlling a number of planets and colonies spread out over a number of solar systems was harder than they thought. To help fight the burgeoning rebellion within their controlled systems, a military organization calling themselves the United Nations Space Command, or UNSC, thought up a method of creating a type of super soldier, one that would be very hard to kill and would be more than just effective in any combat situation. The Project was code named _SPARTAN_ , after an ancient tribe of humans famous for defending a stretch of land with only three hundred soldiers against an enemy force of ten thousand."

The inventor straightened up in his chair, as the strange story took a very strange turn. He had heard the name Spartan somewhere else, and a horrifying suspicion was starting to form in his processors.

The Praxian gave him a small smile before continuing.

"The UNSC took the idea of a Spartan warrior and collected some volunteers, and with the two they created a very costly and small number of their super soldiers. The Project was considered a failure due to the limited success and was abandoned for a little while, until a scientist by the designation of Catherine Halsey came up with a better method. She warned the UNSC that she needed subjects that were barely four to six stellar cycles old for creating viable super soldiers." Wheeljack's vocalizer fins paled to a yellowish white as he stared at her in shock. "She tagged one hundred and fifty human sparklings, she eventually approved seventy-five. Incredibly harsh training and the final augmentation into their adult frames whittled the number down into a bare handful over thirty. One-three-nine is a product of what was codenamed Project SPARTAN-II."

The close-quarters combat specialist waved a hand at the stricken mech. "So are a few of the others, like one-two-seven and zero-four-six."

" _Anyways_ ," 341 door-wings flicked again and 039 fell silent under her reproving glare, "The UNSC was happy with the final product, but not the cost, of the SPARTAN-IIs, and slotted away the information that was used in their creation in a Project called ORION. A few years later, a collection of religious fanatics that spanned several species calling themselves the Covenant started a war with the humans over some detail or another of their religious dogma. The rising costs, both in life and credits, of the intergalactic war made a branch of the UNSC, the Office of Naval Intelligence or ONI, take Project ORION and adapted it to kill less of its subjects and produce more SPARTANs, with the defect of a much shorter life expectancy and a few... irregular personality glitches. They experimented with four companies of SPARTAN-IIIs, Alpha and Beta Companies had about three hundred SPARTANs each but they were sent on suicide missions against the Covenant until the entirety of Alpha were killed and only two survived out of Beta; there was a Charlie Company that I don't know the final condition of; and a few survivors of the Gamma Company that the rest of the SPARTANs on the ship are."

The femme rapped her finger tips against the table as she frowned thoughtfully.

"There was a Delta Company, but I don't know what happened to them either. They were still in training the last I heard of them nearly five thousand years, or sixty or so vorns, ago." 341 shrugged as she waved a hand to the SPARTANs still milling around, curious of how the inventor would react to them now. "We are the last _known_ surviving SPARTANs, not that any of us are counting the Master Chief down and out but he was stranded on a planet named Onyx the last any of us heard."

Wheeljack wondered if his processor had burned out his logic circuits yet, or if the Praxian had actually told him what he thought he had heard. With a squeak that the femmes and mechs were relatively certain was a slight vocalizer glitch; the inventor unsurprisingly asked another question.

"... _wht?_ How?"

Refit waved newly armored fingers in his view. "Long story short; some really bad things happened. Dr. Halsey sent us off in this ship to prevent all SPARTANs from dying in a cataclysmic event that would wipe out all sentient, biological life in our original galaxy. I piloted the _ATHENS_ for about ten of your vorns, looking for someplace to land for the SPARTANs, but almost five vorns ago something collided with the starboard side and caused that rift in the plating."

The ex-AI leaned back, cradling her cube of energon and enjoying the simple fact that she was no longer stuck in a stationary position in Navigation.

"Whatever struck us usurped some of my supplemental programming and dumped an excessive amount of energy into the ship, and yeah..." the femme shrugged in imitation of the tactician, "here we are."

Vocalizer fins nearly completely white, Wheeljack looked from one femme to the other as he tried to wrap his processor over what he had been told. He couldn't conceive of any acceptable reason to take sparklings and make them into soldiers, but none of the 'SPARTANs' seemed to be very bitter about what had been done to them.

That wasn't even touching on the concern of whatever happened to turn them from what they had been into what he saw before him now.

039 downed the rest of his cube quickly before getting up on his pedes. "Get some recharge and try not to think about it, 'jack. Before we start working next orn, we'll show you the SPARTANs that didn't survive the trip."

The mech gave the XO a short wave as he headed out of the room to his own berth.

A flick of 341's door-wings had the rest of the SPARTANs following him out as well, Refit scrambling to catch up with the green and gray mech, and the Praxian femme crossed her arms as she waited for the inventor to fully process what he had been told.

To Wheeljack's credit it took him a moment or two to feel disgust, mostly aimed at the UNSC and ONI organizations that she had mentioned. He could admit, in the dimmest corner of his spark and CPU, that he understood _why_ the SPARTANs had been created even if he didn't remotely approve of the method.

After a few breems of silent contemplation, the inventor realized that he hadn't been told of the differences of the SPARTAN-II bots and the SPARTAN-IIIs. Taking into account what he already knew about the bots on the ship, he figured whatever it was would likely torque him off or scare the rest of his spark out of his frame.

Eventually he looked back up, and realized he had been left alone with the blue and black femme. "Er, ma'am? Need something?"

The XO raised an optic ridge at the nervous mech fidgeting across from her. "Any fritzing needs to be done now."

Wheeljack spluttered into his remaining energon at the firm tone she used.

"I will **not** fritz!" The tactician blandly looked back at him, and the inventor gritted his dental plates in a physical effort not to ask her a thousand and three questions rapidly and freak out at the same time over what had been done to these... these... "What are you calling yourselves now? human, SPARTAN, or Cybertronian? Is that why three-three-seven refuses to let me look at his faulty vocalizer? Does the trine know how to fly? How different is the human home world to Cybertron? Can I ask zero-three-nine about human technology? How were the SPARTAN Programs even _approved?_ "

The blue and black Praxian blinked her gold optics as Wheeljack's questions washed over her in a rush of noise. The mech himself finally realized that he was indeed fritzing on her for the second time and stopped himself from asking another question.

With a groan, the inventor sank down in his chair and thunked his helm on the battered table, torn between embarrassment and frustration.

"It wasn't." The flat tone in the femme's vocalizer made him look up, simply to see if she was irritated or annoyed. 341 shot him a measuring look, before she locked her optics on her half empty cube in her hands. "The SPARTAN Projects were never approved by any ruling body the humans had. Technically, we never happened."

" _What!_ "

"The UNSC only admitted we existed when the Covenant war started, and only because we were the only effective weapon that they had in that conflict. Very few ever found out how we came to be, and by then it was acceptable only because we were an acceptable necessity for survival."

Wheeljack's mouth components snapped shut. 'Acceptable necessity' was a phrase that many Cybertronians were becoming acquainted with, not that it was any great comfort to the mechs and femmes now upgrading themselves with heavier armor and weapon targeting software, just in case.

Almost as if she could sense his unease despite the effort he poured in to remaining calm, 341 purposely changed the subject.

"We call ourselves SPARTANs, I suppose it would be SPARTAN-Bots now, you can decide if we are human or Cybertronian. Our very different, _military_ grade systems are what keeps three-three-seven from letting you look at his parts. Gag orders and all that. The trine has been working on their flying, and I think they are doing well. No bot crashed into stationary objects this orn." She had been ticking off Wheeljack's questions off one hand as she drew the inventor's attention from their rather depressing history to his other concerns. "And yes, you can ask zero-three-nine about human tech, we would actually like your opinion on a few things."

The green and white mech's vocalizer fluctuated between a sickly greenish brown and a violent orange color a few times until he concentrated solely on the next question he posed to her. "What things?"

"Our old medical standby, four-five-eight and one-nine-three seem to think –"

A loud alarm cut the femme off and 341 was up and out of the room before Wheeljack could do more than jerk back in surprise at the loud klaxon.

\V/

Jazz and Prowl had no problem finding the deactivated frames on the highway between Yuss and Simfur.

The frames, along with some loose parts and the odd limb, had been piled up in a rusting mound of metal, leaking oil and half processed energon, a few feet off the road. The black and white Praxian was taking a breem to piece together what had happened while the saboteur pulled guard, using the injuries on the confirmed Decepticon frames and his old Enforcer programing.

Jazz was just thankful that Prowl didn't need his help to search through the remains of the bots that were simply left there to oxidize.

"There were eight Decepticons, and four other bots-five, forgive me." The tactician's calm report drew the silver mech's attention off pretending to pull guard on the clear stretch of road. "One arrived near the end of the altercation."

"Two 'gainst one, 'n favor of da 'Cons?" The saboteur gave up all pretense of pulling guard and wandered over to where the ex-Enforcer was crouched. "Dem 'Cons ain't pushovers when dere's ah fight. Ya thinkin' Neutrals?"

"Highly unlikely." Prowl frowned at the confusing jumble of parts made out of eight ripped apart Decepticons. "What little I can calculate from the pede tracks and injuries, the five should not have survived the altercation. The four original unknowns approached the eight Decepticons, who were searching for something, some words were exchanged, and the rest is too inaccurate to credit. Number five arrived in the middle of the fight, and was responsible for two of the deactivations."

"Other Autobots, den?"

"No Autobot would attempt a dialog with Decepticons without orders to do so." Prowl straightened up and began to follow the pede tracks leading away from the highway.

Jazz made a soft sound to show his agreement, but stiffened and held himself still as the sensors he had planted on the Simfur highway pinged his sensor net. "Uh, Prowler? We're bout ta have company."

'Prowler' flicked his door-wings in dislike over the casual nickname. "My name is _Prowl_ , Jazz. How many?"

The saboteur ignored the pointed reminder and led the way off the highway.

"Six, could be seven. Commin from da Kalis-Simfur bridge." He was going to say more, like that one of them was destroying his sensors as they passed, but then the next sensor pinged. "Frag, deir commin fast. Unless ya want ah fight, we need ta hide."

"The odds of three to one are not favorable to our survival." The ex-Enforcer ignored the dry snort from his mission partner for the obvious observation. "I would like to point out that we may find whoever it was that destroyed the Decepticons in this direction."

Jazz flashed him a tight grin. "Da enemy 'o mah enemy 's mah friend."

Prowl remained silent, even when his battle computer calculated the odd of an outcome in their favor like the saboteur was counting on, which was low enough without distractions.

The two Autobots raced down a badly repaired service road that had ran a little ways parallel to the main highway before breaking off to the south. Jazz kept to a pace that he knew would tire the Praxian framed mech out, but allow him enough time to scout out a good hiding place.

Just before Prowl would have called for a halt, the saboteur suddenly stopped, forcing the tactician to veer off to avoid him and crashed into... nothing.

The Praxian froze as his logic circuits tripped over themselves on the contradicting input to make sense of what had knocked him to his skid plating. His door-wings and frame insisted something solid was in the way, but his optics and other sensors reported nothing.

Trying to somehow stall the impending crash from impeding Jazz and their mission, Prowl was thankful that the saboteur unknowingly solved the logistical problem and forestalled his crash.

"Huh. Looks like ah mix of 'Raj's cloak, an ah force field. Remind meh ta teach ya ta spot da irregular visual patterns da camo gives off."

Prowl gave in to the resulting processor ache with a hiss of hydraulics in answer as he carefully stood up and cautiously checked the condition of his logic circuits and battle computer. "A warning would suffice."

"Right cha are, Prowler." Jazz ignored the slight twitch of irritation from the tactician as he looked around for somewhere to hide the two of them, or at worse, just Prowl. Given that there was a camouflaged force field, the silver saboteur figured some bot would come out and check the Praxian's knock on their door. "Common, just ah bit farther."

Jazz half carried, half dragged the exhausted Prowl to an outcrop of the rocky cliffs that rose up on the side of the canyon, pulling the larger mech up the sheer sides to a medium sized cave halfway up with more than a little bit of effort.

The silver saboteur steered the black and white tactician to the back of the cave system and handed off a sealed cube of field ration energon before forcibly calming his systems down and watching as seven Decepticons drove into the canyon the same way he and Prowl had ran in.

\V/

Wheeljack found 341 and 046 in the room they called the bridge with all but five of the SPARTAN-Bots present.

The seeker trine, 127, and 196 were missing, and four were on their way out of the room, 015, 027, 083, and 337. As the inventor passed the four mechs, he was relatively certain that they would not be sent out to deal with whatever had set off the alarms as they all were still without armor, the metallic green and black painted tank who was their CO caught his optics.

"Do you know any of these bots, 'jack?"

The slightly out of place mech gave only a brief glance to the monitor that showed seven Decepticons, he could tell by the faction insignia they wore, searching the outside of the _ATHENS_ ' shields but pointed to the one that had been frozen on a vid of two additional mechs.

"Hey, I know him. That silver one is Jazz!" 341 raised an optic ridge at his excited tone and peered over him to see who he was talking about. "A mech I know from the Autobot base in Iacon. He was probably sent out to see who crashed out here. Don't know the other one, but... oh _Primus_!"

Refit, who had wandered over to see what the Jazz mech looked like, jumped back when the inventor yelped in horror.

Wheeljack had finally remembered that Ratchet had a copy of his courier run's time table, and that the medic would likely be torqued with him over not calling in to let him know he was still alive after missing a scheduled stop. So worried over what Ratchet would do to him the moment he got in range, he missed the few astroseconds where he had startled the SPARTANs stiff and they had reached for their weapons in alarm.

"Ratch' is gonna weld me to the floor!"

The Praxian XO firmly pried her fingers from her M90A shotgun and scowled at the inventor for his outburst, ignoring 459's rough snickering behind her. "Who is 'Ratch'?"

He looked up at her with a guilty expression, only half covered by his battle mask. "My best friend. I didn't inform him that I would be late or that I was taking a break from my supply run, and Ratchet isn't known for his temper control."

"So he's going to weld you to the floor?" The corner of 046's mouth components quirked up at the flash of amused blue-green Wheeljack sent him from his vocalizer in conformation.

"So, you know one of these two," 341 redirected attention back to the monitors, "and these bots would be... Decepticons?"

"Yes, ma'am!" The inventor gave her a cheeky flash of green as he copied the manner most bots on board addressed her as. "They're probably here because of that other group you sent packing."

"Err, 'jack?" 459, the second largest SPARTAN and only other ground bound tank on the ship, leaned over as if to confide something to the slighter mech. "We didn't _send_ them away. They're still out there… where we left them."

"Oh."

"So," 341 looked to 046, "I guess this is as good of a time as any to start getting used to responding to actual names."

Wheeljack nearly bounced on his pedes at the news, the number thing having been more than a little weird for him to get used to. "Does that mean you're going with one-one-three's suggestion of a designation?"

"Unfortunately." The femme revved her engine irritably, then Shadowdancer looked at him with a cross expression on her faceplate. "But that does mean he's stuck with mine."

\V/

{ _Leave the two on the cliff alone, three-four-one will handle them. Deal with the ones on the ground how you wish.}_

The CO's orders were acknowledged by all five SPARTANs currently outside of the _ATHENS'_ shielding.

127, who had picked the designation of Rook after her favorite game piece, and 196, who now called himself Trickflip for his acrobatic skills, had activated their stealth systems and slipped out the side of the shields through a hole Refit opened up for them.

The trine in the air had exited in the same manner only the breach in the shields for them opened up to the sky instead of the ground.

The saboteur tapped the blurry mess in her view that was the infiltrator on the back left, to signify that she would circle around to the back of the group and approach the left flank. He tapped her arm to tell her that he got her message and a silent conversation with one-one-three, mockingly named Drax by the tactician, informed Trickflip that the trine had a plan of their own.

The infiltrator suppressed the desire to laugh as he aimed his shotgun at the mech currently poking the shield. He waited only long enough for the tactician to ping his comm, informing him that she was now on the field and the ambush could begin.

Pulling the trigger, the loud report of his weapon startled eight non-SPARTANs; the ninth one hit the ground with his left leg missing from the knee joint down and was a bit more preoccupied with the pain.

The Decepticons hesitated for a split astrosecond in shock of one of their own falling for no obvious reason before reaching for their respective weapons, but the remaining six where knocked to the ground as well when two of the trine, Drax and 070, newly named Spotter for his military job class of a recon scout, flew over helm and waited until they were just over the middle of the six to gun their turbines to create a sonic boom.

The resulting shock wave cleared a spot for the last seeker 260, now called Tigerstripe after the Air Force camouflage patterns and who had no stealth capabilities, to drop into the cleared space.

The seeker framed heavy weapons specialist, a saboteur, an infiltrator, and the tactician each grabbed a hold of one of the Cons struggling to rise to their pedes and deactivated them in the quickest way they knew how.

Tigerstripe finished his first and lunged for the next one, a mech trying to regain enough stability to attack the saboteur's back. Rook and Trickflip double teamed the last one as Shadowdancer ripped the vocalizer wires out of the seventh mech screaming on the ground about his lost leg.

The minor altercation, and none of the SPARTANs were feeling generous enough to call it even a minor skirmish, was over in less than a breem of rapid action.

Rook, Trickflip, and Tigerstripe all grabbed one of the deactivated Decepticons and began to drag the frames up to the service road. They would take them to the other pile of rusting parts and leave them there for some bot else to deal with. Drax and Spotter transformed a few feet off the ground in order to help; the trine leader grabbed two of the frames as the recon scout handled the last one.

Shadowdancer slammed the butt stock of her shotgun against the back of the helm of the survivor until she had the time to deal with him, and calmly made her way to where Wheeljack's 'Jazz' mech had taken cover with the black and white Praxian.

\V/

Prowl was, summed up in a word, impressed.

He would have missed most of the altercation if it had not been for Jazz and his door-wings' sensory capabilities. The silver saboteur had pointed out two of the three on the ground using the same type of camouflage as the shield he had run into, and his door-wings had picked up on the atmosphere vibrations of a low flying trine in time to warn Jazz to deactivate his audios.

The seeker's sonic boom had still made both mechs flinch; Jazz couldn't conceive of deactivating anything in unknown territory especially something as sensitive as his audios, and had merely reduced the volume on his pickup; Prowl's door-wings had caught the backlash of the sonic boom ricocheting off the canyon walls and had reported a fierce ache in response. The sudden scattering of the midsized Decepticon group had allowed the last, incredibly large seeker to drop in, and allowed the group of five on the ground to deal with the dazed bots easily enough.

Since there were little to no seeker types in the Autobot ranks, at least where Prowl would have the opportunity to work tactics for them, the black and white Praxian made note of the scattering tactic and the results as the two Autobots watched the as the fight reached its conclusion.

(ooo000ooo)

Jazz was encouraged, despite the violence he had just bore witness to.

Nearly silent, quick to polished perfection and with minimal fuss, the seven Cons had been dealt with in a way that would prevent any report of the strange bots from getting out. His own Special Ops programming had noticed a short ranged jammer after Prowl had warned him about the seekers in the area.

He was fascinated by how the cloaking systems bent visible light through the bots as it deactivated, and speculated on how difficult it would have been to spot them if he hadn't known Mirage for as long as he had.

Both Autobots remained silent as the second femme on the field, the Praxian framed one, approached their cliff, halted a few feet from the rocky base, and then looked up straight at them. "Are you coming down any time soon? Wheeljack wants to know if a mech by the name of Ratchet had gotten a hold of either of you."

"Sup, femme?" Jazz cheerfully called out and dropped from the cave he had hidden himself and Prowl in. "Yeah, Ratch's torqued, but more worried dat 'jack was 'n trouble."

The femme badly suppressed a smirk at that bit of information. "Indeed? Well then, I suppose we'll have to get Spotter to let him make a call on the _ATHENS_ ' communication array. I am Shadowdancer. A pleasure, I'm sure."

As Prowl slowly made his way down the cliff, Wheeljack darted out the hole in the _ATHENS_ ' shields opened for the returning SPARTANs and over to the two mechs. "Jazz! Did Shadowdancer ask you my question yet?"

"Why did you ask me to ask if you intended to ask yourself?"

"Cause if Ratch' told one of them to hit me?" The inventor smirked at the snarl that escaped the blue and black Praxian's systems as she glowered at his cheeky reply.

Jazz looked from the glaring femme to the mech as he helped Prowl down the last few feet of the cliff. "Er, 'jack?"

"It's okay." Wheeljack waved them to follow him as he retraced his steps to find the hole in the shields again. "They talk all tough, but I know for a fact that most of them are rather soft in the spark chamber."

Shadowdancer followed behind the three mechs and snorted at the inventor's claim.

"I dare you to say that to Orpheus. Wait a click," the femme looked at him with confused gold optics, one optic ridge raised at him, "how would you know? You've only been here for a megacycle!"

"How so, 'jack?" Jazz followed the inventor, avidly listening to the mech tease the dangerous looking femme without consequences. If these bots could tolerate Wheeljack poking fun at them, then it made sense they were not Cons in disguise. He looked back at the femme following them to give her a smug smirk and caught sight of the shield's small hole closing up by itself. "Whoa."

"Neat, right?" The green and white mech stopped so Prowl could see what had startled the saboteur. "Galeforce and Knightblade are trading off telling me how that works."

He flicked a sly glance at the femme frowning at him.

"I know by how you all treat Refit, almost like she's fragile. I wouldn't be surprised if the trine snuggled during the off cycle."

Shadowdancer's engine choked as her mouth components dropped open and her left optic twitched. Jazz broke down laughing, both at the disgusted look that crossed the femme's faceplate and the idea of the seeker trine he had seen _snuggling_.

"Eww, 'jack! That was _not_ something I need in my processor! No... just no. I'll give you the little femme, but... no." Her door-wings flicked and twitched as her processor stalled on the image of Drax, Tigerstripe, and Spotter... With a violent shake of her helm, she pinned the gleeful inventor with a glare. "Get your aft in the ship before I tell Drax what you just accused him of doing with his trine."

Wheeljack gave a shout of laughter as he dashed for the _ATHENS_ ' cargo ramp. He barely made it before the SPARTANs waiting for their XO started laughing, punctuated by Drax's loud curses and threats in the inventor's direction.

After the two Autobots caught up to Wheeljack, the inventor led the way to the _ATHENS_ ' rec room as the SPARTAN-Bots split up and left for their various posts and assignments they were responsible for that cycle.

Luckily for the green and white mech, Drax and his trine were sent to the bridge to deal with the communications array instead of being allowed to harass Wheeljack for the snuggling crack. Shadowdancer muttered something about a clingy femme as she too also left, leaving the inventor to lead the the two Autobots to the rec room.

As Jazz and Prowl followed, Wheeljack called out greetings to the SPARTANs that he knew well passing them by. The silver saboteur started poking around when the inventor stopped every now and again to exchange a few words with some of the SPARTAN-Bots or to introduce Prowl, who had started asking about some of the information exchanged and especially the designations that the green and white mech should have already known.

As he figured, Jazz assumed that the _ATHENS_ could and had been used as a small base. When a femme by the name of Knightblade stopped the inventor to discuss some detail or another that she wanted his opinion on, the silver mech took the opportunity to slip away down another corridor without being noticed.

Or so he thought.

Pausing every so often to listen for any bot following, Jazz started to explore the ship on his own.

The detour he had taken led him through the part of the ship that had the personnel quarters, which told him nothing about these bots other than the fact they were very neat and not worried about thieves. Every door he tried had been unlocked, and he couldn't see anything that could be termed personal.

Now just a bit more than just curious about the bots the inventor had found, the Autobot saboteur took the stairwell down back into the lower levels. There were fewer doors to try, but it seemed that the lower deck wasn't as clean as the upper.

Jazz found what looked like a cargo bay turned into a workshop, possibly where Wheeljack had been holed up for the last megacycle. He did a preliminary search, but found no signs that these bots had held the inventor against his will.

Exiting the room, the saboteur held himself silent to listen and ensure that no bot had followed or discovered him before starting for the next door further down the hall.

He took one quick look in the next room, and then just as quickly ducked out. Jazz had found an armory, and a tank that easily outweighed him and Prowl together taking inventory.

Quickly making his way to the next hall, he tried to mentally compare the weapons he caught sight of with weapon systems used by both Autobot and Decepticon forces.

Halfway down the final hall, this one opened to the outside by a gash in the outside armor of the transport, his processor finally admitted defeat in the attempt. The uses and some of the ammunition were similar, but the weapons were fundamentally different.

Jazz compressed his lip components together as he approached the last door. This one was, strangely enough, _locked_.

The saboteur hesitated, debating if he should give up and hope the inventor knew just who these bots were or if he should hack the lock and see what bots that didn't lock their own doors wanted to hide.

Curiosity won out in the end and Jazz hacked the lock, getting a brief view of some dark tanks and purple ooze spilled out on the floor before some bot grabbed him and yanked him out of the room, slammed a hand on the hacked door control, and pinned him to the now closed door with a minimum of gentleness.

The mech that caught the saboteur was a dark green and black painted bot that easily outweighed and towered over the Autobot, with orange optics narrowed on his own visor with an unhealthy amount of frank dislike. "You should leave the dead alone. Now, who the _frag_ are you and what in the _Pit_ are you doing here?"

Jazz was getting the impression that the mech didn't really care if he got an answer. It could have been the small fact the dark mech had him pinned to the door a good foot off the floor or the fact that the slighter silver mech was being slowly crushed back into said door. Regardless, Jazz had the distinct feeling that he might be fragged.

"Orpheus," both mechs snapped their helms to the femme standing a bit farther down the hall, the other femme that had been in the fight just outside of the ship's shields, "Shadowdancer ordered us to let them wander un-accosted."

Jazz could have kissed the gray painted femme. She stared his attacker down until he snarled something rude sounding and dropped the saboteur to his skid plating, not even flinching when the dark painted mech stomped by her. As Jazz rubbed his chest plate, she looked down at him.

"He's right though. You should leave the dead to rest in peace."

"M sorry, femme," he raised an optic ridge over his visor, "but ya all need some signs."

She gave him a wry grin as she held out her hand.

"That _was_ what the lock was for." The Autobot saboteur grasped her hand and was tugged up to his pedes with a jerk that made him stumble a few steps forward. "By the way, I'm Rook. The resident saboteur."

"Heh. No hard feelin's den?" He gave her his most charming grin.

Rook snorted as she shoved him down the hall. "None, mech. But you will forgive me for escorting you to Wheeljack, yes?"

(ooo000ooo)

The gray femme led him into what seemed to be the _ATHENS_ ' bare rec room. A decent amount of SPARTAN-Bots had gathered in a loose circle around a table the Wheeljack and Prowl were seated at with Shadowdancer; a tank larger than the one Jazz had seen on the sub deck and another femme.

"I see you finally decided to grace us with your shining presence, Jazz." Shadowdancer wore a smirk that the saboteur swore was evil. "I hope Orpheus didn't damage you too badly after you wandered off."

He opened his mouth components, but his snarky reply was cut off by the other femme's squeak.

The tan and black painted femme twisted to inspect him for any damage.

"Oh, no! You ran into him?" Her yellow optics caught sight of the cracks in Jazz's paint. "He is so mean, barely tolerates me and 'jack! Are you alright?"

Her obvious concern made the saboteur rethink giving his glib response. Unlike the bots he had seen so far, she seemed a lot younger, almost like a youngling that had just completed her final upgrade.

"M fine, he just growled ah bit." As he took the seat left between Prowl and the femme, Jazz caught the Praxian femme's smirk growing bigger. If he could bet some credits, he would wager that he passed some kind of test.

The slimmer femme passed him a cube of energon. "Here, it's mid-grade, but it's all we have. My name is Refit. Are you a saboteur like Rook?"

"Thank ya, 'fit, m Jazz. An, yeah. M ah saboteur." He took a sip of the energon and shot the cube a quick look. "Actually, it's nearly high-grade."

Wheeljack shrugged with a blue flash of his fins. "Are you complaining?"

"Nope." Jazz ignored Prowl's disproving frown. "So, what's up?"

The massive metallic green and black tank sitting between the femmes held out an oversized hand to them. "I'm Warcry, Commanding Officer of the SPARTAN-Bots. We're just waiting for Spotter to finish the alterations to the _ATHENS_ ' communication array so 'jack can reassure this 'Ratchet' mech that he's still alive. While we have our communication expert on it, do either of you need to contact anyone else?"

Jazz and Prowl shook the outstretched hand in turn as the ex-Enforcer nodded in response to the question. "We should report to our superiors that you exist."

"Why?" Refit asked the question, but none of the three Autobots missed the way all of the SPARTAN-Bots tensed and looked at the black and white mech for his answer.

"So our Boss mech knows ya all don't need some help." The silver mech winked half his visor at the slighter femme. "Don't cha worry. We were just sent out ta make sure ya all are alright."

Jazz ran his thumb over his jaw plate, then jerked the digit to indicate the inventor.

"An ta make sure 'jack here hadn't broken down someplace."

Refit giggled as Wheeljack sputtered in protest.

Prowl unwillingly made it worse when he chipped in with, "Well, it is true. I calculated a thirty-five percent chance that some volatile invention of yours had finally damaged both your transformation cog and your transmission."

The green and white mech muttered sourly as he sank down in his chair. "Gee, thanks. I feel _so_ much better."

Shadowdancer snorted wryly at his sulking. Despite how little time the inventor had been with them, the occasional explosion from the sub deck was not too uncommon anymore.

"Somehow, I'm not surprised." Her door-wings fluttered, catching the attention of the odd group. "Spotter is ready for you now, so let's move this to the bridge."

With a trill, Refit jumped to her pedes and bounced out of the room. "Follow me!"

Wheeljack was only a few steps behind her, the last two Autobots followed at a more sedate pace with Warcry and his XO. A few of the SPARTANs still in the rec room called out some farewells, but didn't follow.

The tan and black femme rushed into the bridge with a chirpy greeting to the trine already there. Drax glared at Wheeljack, but remained where he was as the rest of the Autobots and his commanding officers entered the room. Spotter waved the three over to the center of the room.

"Alright, stand over here and whoever is on comm duty should be able to see you," the silver and white seeker rubbed the back of his helm as he looked over his work one last time, "at least, if I did this right."

"Never heard a word of complaint before." The recon scout twisted around to shoot the XO a grin before turning back to the opened panel that he had been rewiring. "If you three are ready..."

Wheeljack gave a flash of blue as he stepped up to the middle of the bridge. "Fire it up!"

\V/

Ratchet nearly bowled over the mech that had been on comm duty as he flat out ran for the main communication room of Iacon's Autobot base. Windcharger, after he had recovered from almost being trampled by the larger mech, dashed after the yellow medic muttering threats about transferring to Yuss if he kept getting the really important comm calls.

The run took the two mechs a breem to make, Ratchet ignoring the bots that had to jump out of his way and even Sentinel Prime's indignant yells as he rushed passed.

Ironhide had stationed himself outside of the communication room and quickly opened the door when he caught sight of the medic running for him. As the body guard for the younger Prime followed the snarling mech, a huffing Windcharger, he didn't have the long legs like Ratchet, took the position Ironhide had abandoned.

Optimus Prime broke off talking to Jazz and a metallic green and black tank of a mech when Ratchet stormed the room. "' _JACK!_ "

"Here!" The saboteur on the vid screen smirked as he took a few steps back to let the cringing inventor edge into view. "Er... hi, Ratch'! I'm really, _really_ , sorry. I got distracted a bit-"

"To the point where you couldn't respond to any calls, you fragging Pit-spawn!" The medic ignored Jazz's guffaw and continued to berate his old younglinghood friend. "I swear to _Primus_ , 'jack, if you don't have a very good excuse, I'm going to _weld you to the med bay ceiling so I don't slagging lose you again_!"

"If I may," a blue and black Praxian standing behind the tank spoke up when Wheeljack squeaked and ducked as if trying to dodge something thrown at his helm, "Our ship is shielded from outside transmissions unless it goes through the comm array first. It is unlikely that Wheeljack received any communications, as he remained on board for the last megacycle due to high Decepticon activity in the region."

Ratchet was brought up short. "Decepticons?"

"Fifteen in total, two groups since we got here. We were planning on giving Wheeljack an escort when we could ensure that it was safe enough for travel." The tank stepped back so the bots in Iacon could see the femme more clearly. "As it stands, we will likely use the _ATHENS_ to return your three mechs, because if this pattern continues they will possibly be set upon as soon as they get outside of our defensive range."

"If they come back damaged, you junkyard reject, I'm welding your door-wings together." The medic glowered at the reasonable sounding femme. He had wanted to yell a little more, but she just had to be logical.

The femme's door-wings jerked back, as if to hide from Ratchet's view, but she nodded calmly as if she was threatened over the state of her frame regularly. "That is acceptable."

Ratchet's engine grumbled as he stomped to the back of the room next to Ironhide, casting an acidic glare at the younger Prime's shaking shoulders. Optimus had to clear his vocalizer twice before he could trust himself to speak without letting some snicker escape. "You said you had a prisoner from one of the groups?"

"Yep, watched 'em cream does 'Cons myself, Boss mech." Now that Shadowdancer had defused the medic's fury, Jazz took center stage again. "Shadow here and ah few others got ah cloak dat would make 'Raj jealous. Prowler an meh got ah front row seat ta da ambush, an' dey even got ah trine here dey used."

"I see." The younger Prime's battle mask concealed his smile, but every bot could hear his amusement. "Is there any way you could transport your prisoner here?"

Shadowdancer frowned as she reviewed the condition of the lone mech secured in one of the unused quarters and how far away Iacon was.

"Not without issue. The mech is missing most of his left leg, from the knee joint down. His condition is stable," Ratchet's opened mouth components shut with a click, "but it would make any travel arrangement difficult-"

The Autobot base's alarms cut the femme off.

"Prime, we got 'Cons knockin at ta door." Ironhide cycled his arm mounted cannons as he headed for the exit of the communications room. "Ah lot 'o em."

Ratchet started cursing as he followed the black mech out. "And we're slagging short of hands and fragging supplies."

"How soon can you get here?" All trace of humor fled the younger Primes tone.

Shadowdancer gave him a sly smirk.

"You can expect us in three joors," she turned to the only other femme visible in the vid screen, "get this bucket of rusty bolts airborne."

\V/

As Spotter severed the connection with Iacon, Refit dashed to the other side of the bridge to Navigation.

The Praxian XO flashed him another grin as she followed the younger femme, "You and the rest of your trine are providing escort. Once you're out side, sound a regroup for our farthest scouting parties."

The silver and white seeker threw her a salute as he abandoned the jury rigged communications console and left the room.

"Sir?" Warcry paused in following the seekers out of the bridge to alert and brief the others. "A _minuet,_ or a _waltz_?"

The CO hesitated before giving his fellow officer a wicked grin of his own. "Why not jump right in? Waltz."

He nodded to the blue and black Praxian's salute as he left.

"We'll be aloft in a breem, ma'am." Refit's usual bubbly personality took a back seat as she started the _UNSC ATHENS_ ' preflight checks.

"We'll need to stop by the rendezvous cliff, but once we get to Iacon," Shadowdancer leaned over the femme's left shoulder, "over fly the Decepticon line, and prepare to lose weight."

She patted the pilot on the back as she turned to two of the three Autobots.

"Stay here with Refit until we land, she has... panic attacks when left alone. Wheeljack," the inventor looked at her, "can you finish the last four in three joors?"

He nodded firmly, already thinking through what was needed to protect the bots in battle. "The armor is done; we just needed time to attach them to the areas where your soldiers wouldn't be able to reach."

"They will meet you in your work room then," Shadowdancer flicked her door-wings in a Praxian goodbye, and gave a small smile as Prowl responded with his own farewell flick.

"Oh, wait!" Wheeljack pulled a collection of blue and yellow glass spires from his subspace. "I've been working on these. The blue ones are yours and the yellow are... what's the other Praxian's name?"

"Nitro." The XO shot the two spears of glass a suspicious look, then cast a quick glance to the red glass that made up Prowl's chevron. "'jack, I'm not sure about connecting these right before a battle."

"You can fight just as well without these just fine;" the inventor gave the uneasy femme a flash of blue light, "attaching your chevron would only help."

Shadowdancer flattened her lip plates, but finally nodded in acquiescence. "Fine."

The taller femme had to kneel down so the green and white mech could easily reach her helm and the sockets that the spires were intended to go. While the two were occupied, Prowl had taken up her abandoned spot behind the other femme, observing the preflight checks as Jazz snagged the co-pilot's seat. "Got ah question for ya, Shadow."

"Really... about what?"

"What do ya mean by 'lose weight'?"

Shadowdancer cast him a quick glance as Wheeljack made the final connections to her chevron. The sudden influx of data and sensory information made the XO shudder as she got back to her pedes.

"Lose weight is code for an ODST jump." The SPARTAN-Bot tactician frowned as a new feature to her programing made itself known and she explored it a bit while she waited for her processors to settle.

Prowl pricked up his door-wings in interest as the saboteur leaned back in his purloined chair. "Which is code for?"

"Not code." The Covert Operations Tactician gave all three curious Autobots a wicked grin. "ODST is short for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. An ODST jump is a high altitude insertion method for soldiers. We are literally going to fall out the _ATHENS_ and into the fight."

She laughed delightedly at the three wide optic looks that tidbit of information earned her.

"I assure you, we've done this before. Only those with the shocks for it are dropping in; Warcry, Markmaker, Titan, and Silentforce are too heavy to jump, so Refit will have to land for them to get off."


	4. Chapter 4

Two joors and a third of another found the Autobot defenders of Iacon retreating behind the city's acid moat and reinforced walls under the press of the Decepticons' attack.

Optimus Prime stationed his unit to defend the main bridge with Ultra Magnus' Elite Guard as the widely spread Autobot forces tried to retreat pass them.

Both the younger Prime and the military commander were taking a brief break under the cover of a low wall as Optimus told the older mech the results of his gamble to send out his newly acquired saboteur and Zeta's handpicked mech. "Ironhide thinks their purpose built military bots, one of the mechs we saw had the alt mode of a tank, but he couldn't say with any certainty what purpose or unit they were built for."

"A tank, huh? We could certainly use a few." Ultra Magnus flinched sharply as a missile screamed by and detonated on the higher city wall not too far from where they both were sitting, showering them in small bits of shrapnel. "You get the oh-so-lucky task of informing Sentinel that your risky gambit paid off."

Optimus brushed the bigger shards of half melted metal off his armor, something he had long since gotten used to.

"I'll do that the breem Jazz and Prowl return, so he can't argue." He slid a sly glance to the older mech. "These SPARTAN-Bots have a Praxian tactician as well."

" _Primus_ save us all from overly logical bots!" Magnus smacked his helm back against the wall both mechs were leaning against. "Well... that's not too surprising. Praxians excel at handling high data input while retaining coherency."

He was going to say more, but something finally registered to his audio receptors and he tilted his helm to the side as he tried to make out what it was.

"...do you hear that?"

Optimus stilled his systems as much as he could and listened. Over the sounds of battle and the occasional explosion, he could hear a strange whistling growing steadily louder. "Jazz did say they had a seeker trine, so it could be them. It's already been two joors and some of a third..."

Ultra Magnus was going to point out that only seekers could travel that fast and that the ground bound bots would need more time, he even had his mouth components opened to state just that, but a dark blur flickered into view in the sky before he could and barrel rolled into the Decepticon triple changer, Blitzwing. As the two fliers plummeted to the ground, a shimmer of blue drew more attention to the sky just as a field of transparent blue plates peeled back to reveal a midsized transport.

While the ship hovered over the Decepticon battle lines, another seeker flitted through what could only be called an opening in a shield.

Optimus started laughing loudly at the sight. "I think they're here."

\V/

Shadowdancer shot Nitro an annoyed glare as she manipulated the controls for the cargo ramp to open it up. "Quit picking at your paint. We'll give you another coat as soon as we're done here."

The demolitions specialist responded with a Praxian insult that had Prowl twitching at the disrespect for what he assumed was a superior officer.

All ten SPARTANs tagged to jump had crammed themselves into the corridor, each holding onto a side of the hall in a staggered formation as they waited for the XO to open the ramp. The four too heavy for the operation were hanging back with Jazz and the black and white Praxian. Wheeljack was keeping Refit company on the bridge as she held the _UNSC ATHENS_ steady over the battle below.

With the cargo ramp now down, the two Autobots could see just how far the SPARTANs were planning to jump. Jazz had a queasy feeling in his tanks simply from the view, and from the looks of him Prowl wasn't doing much better. "Are ya all _sure_ 'bout dis?"

Rook, stationed at the back of the line with a mech by the name Quickgrip and another femme by the name of Clearsight, giggled lightly at the unease that the saboteur failed to conceal from any of them. "Totally. You sure you don't want to try?"

"M good." He replied quickly as he grimaced at her obvious amusement over his discomfort. "Ah'd bust 'm shocks an' Ratch' would refuse ta fix meh if ah even _thought_ about tryin anythin' like dis."

"ALRIGHT!" The blue and black Praxian raised her vocalizer's volume so the bots in back could hear and ended anymore conversation that would have happened. "We're jumping in! Once you hit dirt, make for the bridge! Markmaker can't fire until you get your lazy afts to the rally point!"

She threw a salute to the CO, and a downright wicked grin at the two apprehensive Autobots, and fell backwards into open sky.

The nine remaining SPARTANs waiting their turn to jump traded off hand holds as they followed their XO's example, most refraining from teasing their guests except for Rook, who gave them a grin almost as evil as Shadowdancer's before she too hurdled herself out of the ship.

Warcry followed the line of bots until he got to the cargo ramp's controls and triggered the closing sequence. "Once we land, and Wheeljack and Refit join us, we'll make for the bridge of the city. You two need to make sure your fellow Autobots don't shoot us by mistake."

\V/

A strangled and cut off curse alerted Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus that they were not seeing things. Ten bots _had_ just dropped out of the half visible ship and into the Decepticon lines, most landing on the Cons to break their fall.

Optimus reset his optics twice while trying to make sense of what he was seeing; Magnus still had his mouth components hanging wide open.

"Efficient." Ether had crept up on the two commanding officers, accompanied by Zeta, as all optics were locked on the spectacle that just happened over helm. "I wonder how many chips these bots are short of a motherboard."

" _You're_ just cranky because you didn't think about it first." The Head of Tactical had a satisfied grin on her faceplate as she admired the chaos unfolding before her. "You do have to admire their ball bearings for actually jumping from that height. It's a wonderful tactic, regardless of what it just cost them. Just listen."

All over the Decepticons' hacked encrypted lines there were half finished, and usually frantic, reports about the 'crazy bots' and the sheer amount of damage they were wrecking on them. The Autobots were cheering the unknown bots on as the moral that had been flagging before their arrival was bolstered with every curse the Cons threw at their unknown attackers.

Ultra Magnus regained enough processor power after a few stunned astroseconds to shut his gaping mouth components. He looked from the Heads of Tactical and Special Operations Divisions to the newly enthusiastic Autobots, to the pleasantly surprised Optimus Prime next to him. "I hope some bot got a vid of that. Wouldn't mind seeing it again myself."

\V/

Blitzwing groaned as his optics flickered online. A searing pain in place of his wing joints informed the Decepticon triple changer that yes; some crazy seeker had crashed into him midair and ripped off his wing plates before leaving him to fall helplessly to the ground alone.

Hazily, the triple changer pushed himself up to his knee joints and staggered to his pedes. Confused over the abrupt change of tone over the comms and still dazed from his impact with the ground, it took him a couple of steps to realize that the dark seeker that attacked him was still around, watching him from a few feet away.

Throwing the wings he had ripped off at the other mech's pedes, Drax smirked at the Decepticon. "Not much of a fighter, are you?"

"Frag you... you Autobot pet!" Blitzwing snarled at the seeker, not daring to turn his back even a little to the strange watchfulness in the dark mech's optics. With a twitch, his calmer personality took over. "What are you doing? Starscream is a _Decepticon!_ "

The Covert Operations Assault Specialist tilted his helm as he considered the abrupt change in personality in the other mech and what it probably meant. "Don't know any 'Starscream's. Don't care, either."

With an incoherent screech, the triple changer threw himself at the seeker, only to be shot through the spark chamber by a rifle he never noticed the other mech holding.

Drax frowned at the mass of smoking metal that had once been a Cybertronian flier. { _Three-four-one? My target wasn't altogether there. Returning to the fight._ }

\V/

The four Autobot officers had abandoned their defensive positions in order to see the exactly how the ten bots and two seekers were affecting the battle. Their new position also allowed them to see Jazz run around some of the moat to the bridge followed by Zeta's picked mech, a familiar green and white mech, and five unusual looking bots.

Three of the bots broke off and remained at the far end of the bridge as a metallic green and black tank and a tan and black femme Optimus Prime recalled from the vid conference followed the Autobots.

Once he got within a short enough distance so he wouldn't have to yell, the silver saboteur threw the officers a salute by placing one hand over his spark chamber. "Da Jazz-mech reportin', Prime sir!" Ah got with meh one Warcry an' Refit, War's da commander of 'em rippin' dem 'Cons ah new exhaust, an' 'fit's deir pilot. Oh, an' 'jack's 'n one piece."

" _Thanks_ , Jazz." Wheeljack glowered at the unrepentant saboteur as he beckoned for the widely grinning ex-AI to follow him. "We'll go help the medics, Prime, sirs, ma'am."

Refit giggled and waved goodbye as she followed the inventor with half of the delivery for Iacon.

Warcry flicked a glance at the sky in exasperation before turning to the Autobot command crew. "Right... do you have any soldiers left on the battlefield? You'll want them to fall back before Markmaker starts playing with that new cannon of his."

Optimus gave the other tank framed mech a double take as he spotted said cannon. The two mechs that had stopped with 'Markmaker' had quickly piled up a large amount of rubble behind the tank, who was sitting in the middle of the bridge in his alt form and playing with the targeting sights on the odd looking cannon mounted on his turret.

Zeta answered for the startled Prime. "We have a few light units and a number of heavy ones that were called to retreat but got pinned out there."

"Let's just see about that." The tank crossed his arms over his chest plates and tilted his helm and only Ether picked up the faint traces of a heavily encrypted data link. "Rook all but fell into one of your light units, Shadowdancer is responding to assist. Quickgrip found another; he and Holdout are clearing the nearby Decepticon teams out of the way before they risk moving. Titan is responding to one of your heavy units."

One of the two mechs on the bridge pulled an odd looking rifle out before all but diving helm first into the battlefield even as the SPARTAN-Bot commander spoke.

"Knightblade is supplying covering fire for three heavy units." Warcry grimaced and rubbed the side of his helm as Ether lost the feel of the data link. "I don't know how Shadow' can fight and handle a tactical uplink at the same time, but she said she would get the rest."

The Kaon's ex-Enforcer Chief jerked from watching the subtle changes in the tides of battle to stare at the tank.

"Handling a 'tactical uplink' in _that?_ I don't know how she's doing it either," she winced at the thought of being swamped by the sheer amount of data and having to fight for her life at the same time, "but can I steal her from you? _Please?_ "

Warcry snorted dryly at her obvious awe for his XO, then snapped out a hand and yanked Ultra Magnus out of the path of a stray missile. "Good luck with that, but in the mean time? Can we move?"

\V/

Part of Shadowdancer's processor and a fraction of her battle computer were pulled from her link with Spotter when Rook bit out a rather acidic human curse phrase. Her door-wings flicked and arched, using the vibrations around her to report back that one of the Autobots that the saboteur had found had been shot, and the other SPARTAN femme was pulling back to toss the mech over her shoulder.

The tactician ripped her Covenant Energy Sword through a Decepticon trying to get by her and attack Rook's back as her link with Spotter's sky high optic view picked out a heavy Autobot unit being pinned by the Cons near the west side of Iacon's acid moat. Her door-wing sensors reported the sudden movements of another attacker a few feet away aiming a rifle at her helm and she bent low as she pinged Tigerstripe's comm to escort the heavy unit.

She twisted back and used her augmented strength to split the bot that shot at her length wise as a tiny part of her processor noted another attacker aimed at the saboteur who had just slung the injured mech over her shoulder and turned back to run instead of fight.

A flick of her wrist and she snatched the deactivated bot's rifle out of his loose hands, whirled around and shot the latest attacker as her tactical uplink noted the location of a possible sniper nest. Sending the location to Trickflip and Orpheus, Shadowdancer emptied her borrowed weapon into the flank of another group of Decepticons.

"Go, Shadow!" She identified the vocalizer as Rook's, and the tactician hesitated only long enough to shoot another bot getting too close to her subordinate before dropping the now empty rifle and carving a lethal swath to Titan and his heavy unit.

\V/

Quickgrip shot out a hand and ripped the blaster pistol out of a mech's grip before kicking the same bot hard and shooting him once he hit the ground.

Tossing the pistol to Holdout after she finished ripping the helm off another Con, he dove and took out the pedes of two additional bots, making the three fall into a pile of metal and keeping both from using their own ranged weapons from harming either of them. The tracker shot one as he grappled with the other, finally taking hold of a mace like piece of metal and bludgeoning the last bot's helm in.

Holdout helped him up as she shot another Decepticon that had tried to rush and assist the four that attacked the two SPARTANs. "Just like old times, right?"

Quickgrip cast a look around to the sheer confusion around them as he waved the Autobot unit they had been tasked with escorting onwards. "If by 'old times' you mean fifty or so vorns ago, then yeah."

\V/

Nitro ducked some bot's wild swing at his helm as the XO pinged him to cover the retreating Autobots not fifty feet away. He started to laugh wildly as he grabbed the mech that swung at him and ripped his helm off before dropping to his knee joints next to the now deactivated frame. "Let's see how well a _Cybertronian_ explodes."

The demolitions specialist dropped two timed charges from his stash of explosives on the bot's chest plate before running away.

He ignored the random shouts about the possibility that his creators were made out of tin and the speculations about his courage as he ran for it.

Five... four... three... _two...!_

\V/

Waiting for the demolition specialist's explosion, Trickflip covered the report of his shotgun with the distraction as he shot one of the snipers aiming out at the field of battle. The second shot was audible to the last two Decepticon snipers, and they abandoned the half destroyed building the tactician had fingered as a sniper's nest.

The infiltrator patiently waited outside of the building and shot the third bot as he ran past, watching the fourth and final sniper suddenly spring a fountain of oil and energon from his neck cables as Orpheus drove the point of his Convenant dagger just under the mech's helm, covering both the assassin's arm and the short energy blade in softly glowing green.

Both still under the cover of their stealth systems, Trickflip spoke up, as no bot alive other than his fellow SPARTAN would hear him. "Another sweep or do you want to guard one of those Autobot units?"

"A sweep. I don't want to sparkling sit some half-processor unit."

Smirking at the surly response, the assassin couldn't see him anyways and threaten him for it, the infiltrator pinged the tactician for another possible sniper nest location.

\V/

Lining up her sights with another Decepticon, Knightblade held herself completely still as she slowly squeezed the trigger.

The mech's helm disintegrated with a few spurts of energon, oil, coolant, and quite a few sparks, leaving the Autobot unit with Titan free to meet up with Shadowdancer and Rook, as long as no other Decepticons from the east side of the battle wandered into their way.

The sniper cast a quick disapproving glare to the sight of Nitro's little Cybertronian bomb, before checking to make sure she was still in the clear and setting her sights on another group that was headed full tilt to Tigerstripe and the Autobot unit he was guiding.

She figured they were thinking that a grounded seeker would be easy to kill, and snickered to herself over their stupidity as she lined up another shot.

\V/

Tigerstripe ignored the first mech in the next group of Decepticons and concentrated on the next two. One of the Autobots he had been ordered to lead to the bridge shouted out a warning, which trailed off weakly as the first mech rushing towards them suddenly developed a hole in his helm.

The massive seeker caught the neck support of the next one and swung him bodily into the third as the fourth went the same way as the first. Dropping the second, who was now less than a mangled wreck from being used as a club, the seeker slammed his fist into the last mech's faceplate and used his ill-gotten assault rifle to aerate his chest plates.

"Alright, that's the last of them. Let's go."

The Autobots of the unit behind him couldn't find a reason to argue.

\V/

Galeforce picked up a smaller built Con and slammed him into a small cluster of three other bots, causing the slighter mech to shatter some armor plates and warping the frames of all four, before the SPARTAN twisted around and ripped the arm off another bot and use it as a rather oddly bent club and offlined the mech trying to get behind Clearsight as she dealt with another issue.

The scout herself flipped a Decepticon femme over her shoulder and shot her as she hit the ground. She grimaced at the incredible mess she and the Close-Quarters Combat Specialist had just made, and cast an incredulous look at the reason for the pause. "Here? You had to pick the thickest group of the 'Cons we've seen yet to get shot at?"

The Autobot smirked around another wince as one of the other mechs from his unit clamped his badly leaking energon lines. "Sorry beautiful, not my choice to get shot."

She sighed dramatically, trying to keep the injured mech's attention on her and not what his battle buddy was doing in the blasted out hole in his side plating. Clearsight shot two of the bots Galeforce had downed like bowling pins, guessing that the other two had either slunk off or tried to attack the Combat Specialist again, she couldn't decide. "Well, hurry up. I want to see the inside of Iacon _sometime_ this cycle."

\V/

Titan, Rook, Shadowdancer, and the two Autobot units following them reached the bridge only a little ahead of Tigerstripe and the group tailing him.

Ratchet had been summoned to the bridge through Refit by Warcry for the mech slung over his saboteur's shoulder, Wheeljack and the ex-AI following in the medic's wake. Once the first of his bots got onto the bridge, the Heavy Weapons framed seeker took off to assist his Trine Leader with the aerial fights over helm.

The surly medic gave an irritable rev of his engine at the seeker's retreat, but contented himself with scanning the two femmes that he knew for a fact had pulled that broken processor stunt at the beginning of their battle. "How the frag you all didn't bust your shocks is a Primus _slagging_ miracle."

Rook simply smiled calmly at the yellow mech as she passed the injured bot slung over her shoulder to the inventor and accepted a clean rag from Refit to mop up the spilled fluids on her armor. "I can assure you that nothing was 'busted', at least, not on any of us."

"Oh really?" Ratchet glared at the femme as he watched Wheeljack start to patch up the worst of the injuries, showing the curious pilot how it was done. "You sound very fragging sure of that."

The SPARTAN saboteur jerked her thumb to indicate the Praxian staring out at the battle next to her. "She's got an uplink with all of us. If some bot was injured, she would know before we did ourselves."

Shadowdancer's door-wings twitched once sharply before looking back at the medic. "Galeforce reports that one of the mechs in the unit he and Clearsight have is badly injured. Gale's taking the mech here on his own and will reach the bridge in approximately one breem."

"Terrific." Ratchet waited until the blue and black Praxian's attention returned to the battle before reaching out and jerking Rook closer so the other femme hopefully wouldn't overhear. "How long has that fragging Praxian been linked to you, and _how many is she linked to_."

The gray femme blinked at him in some surprise, wondering at the reason for the reaction out of the medic mech.

"She always had a link with us, since we got out of stasis; it just wasn't this strong before." She looked over to the tan and black femme peering over the inventor's shoulder before looking back at the medic. "And there are seventeen of us on the field, why?"

Ratchet frowned as he tried to compute how much draw that had on the Praxian femme's processors and CPU. "Seventeen? Fragging Pit-spawn, she's lucky she hasn't blown something yet."

" _She_ can hear you." The tactician threw them both a distracted frown. " _She_ knows better than to maintain the links this strong when I don't have to. And the data link goes through another bot before me, happy now?"

"Ecstatic. You _will_ tell me when you blow a circuit or two." He held the femme's gold optics with his own, not backing down even as her own optics narrowed in irritation.

"I promise to report any further injuries, either myself or any of the others, personally." Shadowdancer flicked her door-wings at him dismissively before returning her attention to the battle.

Ratchet glared at her back plates, but helped Wheeljack move the slightly less injured mech back to the triage area.

\V/

Knightblade watched a number of Decepticons go down through her scope with no visible reason why.

If she had to name the unseen attackers, she would guess Trickflip and Orpheus, as they both had the MJOLINER armor type to conceal themselves. The sniper held a silent conversation with the tactician before abandoning her temporary sniper nest to meet up with the Covert Ops mechs.

She shot a Decepticon in the chassis at the same moment the mech's helm disintegrated under a shotgun blast. "Good evening... off-cycle, Trickflip, Orpheus."

"Sup Knight?" The infiltrator sounded rather cheerful as he flickered back into view. "We done here?"

"For now. We are supposed to be making for the bridge."

"Heh." Trickflip didn't seem too abashed at being caught ignoring orders. "Then what are we waiting for?"

\V/

Galeforce had finally thrown the heavily injured mech over his shoulder and ran for the bridge and medics, leaving Clearsight with the rest of the Autobots to follow at a slower pace than the two lone mechs could manage on their own.

He swapped positions with Silentforce once he reached where the other SPARTANs had set up Markmaker, trading off the injured mech for the defensive specialist's weapon as the red and black mech knew where the medics had stationed themselves. Waiting for the silent mech's return, Galeforce shot some of the bots between Quickgrip's group and the bridge.

The gray and green SPARTAN slapped the other mech on the back once the close-quarters weapon specialist got close enough.

"Tag, you're it." Tossing the traded off rifle to the other SPARTAN's hands, Galeforce dove back into the battle. He passed Holdout covering the end of the newly returned Autobot unit, who gave him a mildly amused look as he ran back to where he had left the scout.

Silentforce, newly returned from handing off the badly injured mech to the medics, raised an optic ridge at the growling coming from the gray and black mech staring off after the combat engineer. The tracker shook her helm at her temporary partner as she walked past the tank blockading the bridge and off to see what else the tactician had for her.

\V/

Nitro had been diverted to assist Clearsight by Shadowdancer once Galeforce had to evac the only injury in a hurry. The demolitions specialist grumbled as the scout glared at him from between the last few Decepticons in the immediate area.

The Praxian mech wanted to try to make a bigger Cybertronian blow up, but both Clearsight and the tactician refused to let him. "Slagging femmes."

"What was that?" The scout shot a bot that failed to get behind the Praxian framed SPARTAN, and Nitro shuddered as the minor shock wave that the bullet had created was reported by his door-wings in a nauseating way.

He shot her a dark glare as he sighted another bot rushing her back through the scope on his rifle. "Nothing."

"Is he throwing a tantrum?" Galeforce had finally returned, sans one injured mech, shooting the last two bots in his way as he took up position on the scout's left, with Nitro taking the right against the thicker ranks of Decepticon bots trying to deactivate the unit they were with.

"Yeah, and just because Shadow said no more bombs." Clearsight smirked at the aggravated groan the demolitions specialist gave her for that quip.

Nitro muttered some more curses under his intakes as he dodged a fist and threw his own back.

"One, just one I tell you, blown to slagging pieces, and suddenly I'm the mad fragging bomber." He glared at his fellow SPARTANs as they laughed at him, flat out ignoring the occasional shocked look from the Autobots behind them. "I'm the Pit-spawned _demolitions_ specialist. I'm _supposed_ to make things go boom!"

Clearsight slammed the butt stock of her borrowed rifle against the helm of a Decepticon femme that rushed at her with glowing blades emitting from her forearm plates. "You made a... mech... go boom."

"Wait, what?" Galeforce had mostly ignored the Praxian's grumbling, but he was pulled up short by the scout's acidic reply. His moment of distraction allowed a Decepticon with a shotgun to shoot him in the faceplate at point blank range.

The two other SPARTANs, the rest of the Autobot unit fighting behind them, and the surrounding Decepticons all froze as the green and gray mech blinked at his shooter through the faintly shimmering shield that deflected the shot. They held still right up until Galeforce slammed a fist in the mech's jaw. "That fragger!"

Clearsight started snickering helplessly. "You sound like he tried to grab your aft!"

"Yeah, yeah, keep laughing femme." The gray and green mech glowered at the remaining bots. "We only got this last group till we hit the bridge."

\V/

Three joors into the battle and the Decepticon forces were faltering under the onslaught of both the SPARTANs in the field and the amassed sniper fire coming from Iacon's city walls.

Warcry stood with Ultra Magnus and Optimus Prime, watching the progress of the battle from behind the dubious safety of the city's acidic moat.

The three Commanders' subordinates had left them to their own devices; Zeta wanted a full report from Prowl, Ether and Jazz had left to coordinate the Autobots' Special Ops agents still outside of the city walls, and Shadowdancer had left to confer with the newly returned SPARTANs and what they could expect to be doing now that they had returned to a safe location.

Optimus, having only been a Commanding Prime for the Autobots for just under five vorns and most of it was spent in an office rather than a battlefield, was feeling a little out of his depth standing between the Autobots' Military Commander and the SPARTAN-Bots' Commanding Officer. Both seemed to have vorns more experience than he did, along with the enviable skill of looking over a combat zone filled with dead or dying bots without the same sickening feeling rising up in his own tank.

His unease must have been obvious to the two other mechs, because the two gave each other and then him a sidelong glance.

"Are we going to have to tell you horribly embarrassing stories about our first times on a field of battle, or are you good?" The younger Prime jerked his optics to lock with the tank's own gold ones.

Ultra Magnus started to snicker from his other side. "We could get him overcharged first, then make some _incredibly_ sappy speeches."

Optimus sighed behind his battle mask, he should have expected this from the two of them as Ironhide did it often enough. "I will **order** you two to spend the next _ten_ off cycles keeping Kup company in the Security Control room."

"Ah, yes. A fate worse than deactivation." Magnus caught the confused look the other tank gave them. "Kup likes to tell long winded war stories over and over again."

Warcry's lip plates twitched in suppressed amusement as he threw an unfamiliar salute to the younger Prime by bringing up his right hand to his right optic ridge and shortly jerking it in his direction. "Sir, sorry sir! It will never happen again, sir!"

"... _oh-kay_. Not going to ask." The three mechs looked over to the newly returned Praxian femme giving all three of them a strange look back. Shadowdancer raised an optic ridge at Optimus, who gave her a pleading look with his optics, asking her silently to change the subject. After a moment, when the younger Prime was almost convinced that she would show him mercy, she gave them all a wicked grin of her own. "I heard a lap dance works as well, especially after getting overcharged."

Both military commanders broke down laughing at the brief look of horror that crossed Optimus' half visible face plate. " _Primus_... never mind. Report!"

The SPARTAN XO stiffened her spinal support until it was straight as a ruler and threw him the same salute the tank had barely a half a breem before. "All Autobot units have been recovered. One walking injury, one that required evac to the triage area. Zero friendly fatalities since our arrival. Six SPARTANs still on the field; Trickflip, Orpheus, and Knightblade are retreating to the rally point, estimated time of arrival is three breems; Drax and Tigerstripe are supplying covering fire; Spotter transmitting Over-Watch."

Some of the tension lacing the younger Prime's frame eased, hearing that.

"Thank you." He had worried that most if not all of the units caught outside during the retreat would have been completely lost. Hearing that all had been recovered with only two injuries lifted a huge burden off his spark.

Warcry clapped Optimus on the back as he nodded to his Third in Command. "Tell Markmaker he is clear to fire once the three on the ground get back."

\V/

"You would think that Covert Ops would be faster!" Knightblade jumped a deactivated frame, and then rolled to avoid some bot's swing at her helm.

"Yeah, well... blow it out your afterburners, femme!" Trickflip all but tackled the bot that had swung at the sniper, shot the mech under the jaw plate as they rolled, and leapt back to his pedes, running after the SPARTAN femme. "Were built for stealth and staying power!"

Orpheus was bringing up the rear, and he had already warned the two other SPARTANs that if he caught them he would rip out their spinal supports to use as weapons while beating them both to deactivation.

Normally, if the assassin was surrounded like he had just a few breems ago, having the two shoot every one of the fragging Cons before he was injured wouldn't be a problem. It only became a problem when the infiltrator and sniper shot the bots in _just_ the right way to shower the assassin in glowing energon, slimy oil, and glittering shards of metal that rendered Orpheus' stealth systems invalid. Causing all three of them to conduct a suicide run to the bridge or risk getting caught up in a quagmire of Decepticons trying to kill them.

Needless to say, the assassin was not a happy bot at the moment.

Orpheus gritted his dental plates as the main bridge to Iacon's city gate appeared in his sight. Shadowdancer and Silentforce had stationed themselves on either side of the bridge next to Markmaker's tank alt form. Knowing the XO, she would have some curt comments about his current paint job and the trouble it gave the three.

As soon as she was close enough, Knightblade slid backwards underneath the tactician's widely braced legs, twisting around to aim her sniper rifle back the way she had ran all in the same movement.

Trickflip didn't bother to stop anywhere close to where the sniper did, running up Markmaker's right tread and over to drop behind the tank. He started to pile up more rubble behind the assault specialist to help brace the mech against the large cannon's tremendous recoil.

Orpheus stopped before the other two, taking Silentforce's position as the quiet mech traded off his rifle before leaving the three to assist the infiltrator with bracing the tank.

Markmaker swung his turret down and aimed carefully; keeping in his processor that the tactician warned him he would only get a few shots with the Forerunner built Sentinel Beam Cannon.

Shadowdancer cast a quick glance to the assassin as she repositioned herself so the tank's shot wouldn't blind her. "I could order them to wash you."

The sniper's huff of outrage was muffled behind the cannon's first volley. All five SPARTANs on the bridge had deactivated their optics a split astrosecond before the cannon fired, but the four still in their bipedal forms still raised their optic ridges at the sheer amount of destruction the lone cannon carved in the Decepticon lines trying to funnel onto the bridge after them.

" _Why_ did the Forerunners go extinct again?" Trickflip leaned against the mound of rubble as he waited for an answer.

A rumble of gears sounded as Markmaker rearmed his new favorite cannon for his next shot.

Shadowdancer gave her fellow Covert Operative a long look as the tank braced himself against the recoil. "I have no idea. I think that it had something to do with water."

"No, it was something they called the Flood." Knightblade used the pause as Markmaker fired his cannon again to reload her sniper rifle before taking shots at the Cons that escaped the second shot from the tank. "A parasite like life form that subsumed sentient life, the more intelligent the better for it. The Master Chief brought that Intel back after the Battle of Instillation Zero Four."

As she was lying on her front chassis, the sniper missed the incredulous looks her fellow SPARTANs gave her.

"That was why Dr. Halsey sent us off like she did. Some Forerunner backup plan came to life when someone or something let the Flood loose. A weapon that eliminated the Flood's food source, all sentient and biological life in the Milky Way Galaxy."

The tactician stopped and looked at her metal arms.

"All sentient... _biological_ life, huh?" Her attention was drawn back to the battle as Spotter reported the beginnings of the Deceptions' retreat. "Cease fire."

Shadowdancer waited a tense breem to ensure that the attacking force was not just trying to feint and draw them off before flicking the safety on her shotgun and slinging it to rest on her back.

"Pull back and regroup with the others."

\V/

Barricade and Bonecrusher watched the cowards run from the bots on Iacon's bridge. The ex-military mech glared at the retreating so-called Decepticons but the Constructicon kept him from attacking any in his rage. "We were just sent to see how much resistance the Autoscum would put up to defend the city, not rip up our own forces beyond what was needed."

"They were doing fine until those _Pit-be-damned_ bots dropped in." Barricade wrenched himself out of the other mech's hold and stomped away.

Bonecrusher simply watched the specks of odd muted and bright colors gather in front of Iacon's gates, well past the main bridge. Unlike his fellow Decepticon, he could appreciate the brutality that the new bots had wrecked on the riffraff Decepticon attackers they had thrown at the military base/city.

Any Autobot would be horrified by how efficient the strange bots were in battle, no quarter or mercy given, but they might be desperate enough to take them in anyways.

Blitzwing had encountered one alone, and had sent him a brief comm line about the dark blue and black seeker that ripped him out of the sky, and what he could about the seeker's strange behavior before his more volatile personality took over and got himself deactivated.

Bonecrusher followed after his fellow Decepticon and wondered how much Starscream would be willing to deal for details about some seeker that didn't recognize him as the next Supreme Air Commander.

\V/

Ratchet handed his last patient off to the medics tasked with transferring the heavily damaged bots to Iacon's med bay.

As the three left the triage area just inside of the city's reinforced walls, the medic took the time to ensure that all of the walking wounded were being seen to. Finally admitting to himself that he could do nothing else where he was except hang over the other medics shoulder joints and making them and their patients nervous, Ratchet stalked off to corner his best friend about the strange bots that he'd brought back.

He found Wheeljack assisting the civilian construction bots with repairing a few of the holes that had been blasted into the city's walls. Processor locked on the methods of interrogating the inventor Ratchet nearly missed the sight of one of the new bots, the tan and black femme introduced to him as Refit, hefting a plate of metal that easily towered over her up and holding it steady against the wall as the green and white mech and some of the other construction bots welded it into place.

The medic stopped short of his friend, watching the bubbly natured femme as she took a cautious step back and hesitantly released the plate. She giggled at the cheer raised as the welds held; bouncing back to Wheeljack's side as the rest of the construction bots finished welding the metal to the wall. "That was fun, 'jack! What are we doing next?"

Pointing further down the wall, Wheeljack opened his mouth components but Ratchet interrupted the inventor before he could say anything. " _What_ are you?"

"...that's a hard question to answer." The tan and black femme blinked her peculiar yellow optics at him. "Three- _Shadowdancer_ said you all would decide that, but in the meantime, we are to be called SPARTAN-Bots."

Before the medic could ask what _that_ was supposed to mean, Wheeljack laid a hand on his arm with a cautious flash of orange light spilling from his vocalizer fins.

"Be careful of what you ask them, Ratch'. If you ask, they _will_ tell you." The inventor shuddered as he thought about some of the answers he had gotten to his own questions. Ratchet rounded on his friend but stopped short at the sight of the sickly green and orange color now pulsing from Wheeljack's fins. "Sometimes? It's _really_ better not to know."

The medic looked between the two oddly serious bots before throwing up his hands. " _Fragging_ fine! Refit, are any of the bots you came with injured?"

"...depends on your definition of 'injured', sir."

The former AI shifted uneasily at the two strange looks that statement earned her.

"None of the SPARTAN-Bots have sustained injury or damage from _this_ conflict, but a number of them have prior malfunctions that did affect their performance during this battle..." Refit tilted her helm to the side in confusion as the looks she was getting didn't change at all. "...would you like a list, sir?"

Wheeljack slapped a hand over his optics as Ratchet's engine started to growl his discontent.

"They've been broken this whole time?" The inventor asked out loud in disbelief.

"Not helping, 'jack." The medic cycled his vents forcibly before returning his attention to the very confused femme, trying hard not to yell at her as it wasn't her fault the bots she was with were dodging him. " _Yes_ , Refit. A list would be nice. Start with your _slagging_ commander and work your way down."

\V/

The Autobot command crew watched the bots that literally fell from the sky as they gathered in front of Iacon's main gate. Warcry, Shadowdancer, and the other tank named Markmaker had stationed themselves in the middle of the loose circle, performing what the tank CO had called an 'after action review'.

So far, it sounded like a detailed _verbal_ debriefing of every bot's view on how the Decepticons had handled their arrival; how well they had regrouped, how they handled whatever weapon they had, along with any other observation the individual SPARTANs had determined in the middle of battle.

Zeta was listening in avidly. She had remarked to her fellow officers that the debrief going on was very likely the single most coherent review of the fight that she would ever hear or read. The old Kaon Enforcer Chief had barely restrained her curiosity about the strange bots' tactical uplink, and whether or not she could get the specs for it.

After he had finally stopped grumbling over their bizarre tactics, Ether was also waiting impatiently for them to finish. He had a few questions of his own, mostly about the group of bots at the back of the loose circle. The Praxian femme apparently belonged to this group, the bots that were called the 'Covert Ops'. If he had to guess, they were a version of his own Special Operation Division, and he wanted to know just how different they were.

Ultra Magnus and Optimus Prime listened in with their own interest in the forefront of their CPUs. Both could see the benefits of obtaining a verbal report of recent battles immediately after combat instead of waiting at the least an orn or two for the written reports. Apparently, Shadowdancer expected those as well, but a personal overview would allow the officers to plan around any surprises before the next attack could even be contrived.

All four Autobot officers had their questions, but before any of them could even approach the SPARTAN-Bots about them as the debrief wound down the frighteningly common sight of a severely torqued off optic sore of a yellow medic stormed up to the group of bots. Wheeljack and Refit timidly following behind a safe distance. The SPARTANs got out of Ratchet's way quickly as he stomped his way to the three bots in the middle, and one Praxian in particular.

"You slagging _Pit-spawn!_ " He jammed his finger in the Praxian's left shoulder joint harshly, causing her to wince and jerk away holding her abused joint. From what Refit had told him, none of the femme's joint was fit for a junkyard, much less a battlefield. "Fifty _fragging_ vorns without even a _Primus_ _be damned_ maintenance check? On top of half of you _glitched out_ processor bots having major malfunctions for just as many _slagging_ vorns?"

Half of the assembled bots suddenly looked away, either at the sky or down at their pedes, not wanting to draw the medic's ire to them, especially if he could make their homicidal XO take a few steps back in his initial assault. Shadowdancer frowned at him thoughtfully, but Ratchet pulled a wrench from his subspace and hefted it at her helm as it he would throw it if she spoke before he was done.

"Yes, you neatly dodged me by promising to report 'further injuries', you half-cocked, _junkyard built Praxian!_ " The medic grabbed her left arm and yanked down hard, causing a protesting screech of damaged gears to sound as she staggered. "The very _astrosecond_ you and the rest of these fragged up bots are done here, you will report to my med bay! _Do you understand me_?"

He stared down the tactician until she looked away with a nod, unable to argue.

Warcry's optic ridge rose. "Whoa... I never even win an argument with her..."

Markmaker snickered as the tactician threw them both a glare.

"Why didn't I notice?" Wheeljack slouched at the back of the group with a silent and uneasy Refit, who was wondering if she had done something wrong by informing the medic of the issues. "Why didn't you tell me?"

His vocalizer fins flashed a guilty purple.

Shadowdancer cycled her vents in exasperation as she looked over to the inventor, door-wings twitched in a Praxian apology. "I _tried_. Right before Prowl ran full tilt into the shields."

"Regardless," Ratchet's engine revved angrily at the half-annoyed, half-apologetic glare the femme gave him, "you all have one orn to get your broken _afts_ into my med bay, or I will hunt you down and _drag you all_ , kicking and screaming if I must."

He gave the Praxian a dark glare of his own before stomping off to look his own officers over.

Ironhide had joined the four high ranking Autobots by this time, submitting silently to the medic's scans when he translated a portion of the yellow mech's mutters about the possible stubborn alloys that all Praxians were built out of. Optimus and Magnus exchanged amused looks as Ratchet turned on Ether and his busted finger joints with grumbles of accusations about the bots' possible ancestors.

"Ratchet?" Zeta frowned as the medic finished with the Head of Special Ops and turned on Magnus's laser grazed side. "Are they really that badly off?"

The yellow mech spared her a short glance as he clamped off the small leaks in the Military Commander's chassis. "Fifty vorns without a maintenance check isn't that slagging unusual, not for Cybertronians that leave Cybertron for any amount of time."

He traded his crimping tool for a welder and closed up the hole in Magnus' side as he continued.

"But the rest of it? I got their pilot to tell me what else is wrong with them. Most of them dropped into stasis lock due to excessive damage, all of them spent the entire trip in Recovery Chambers and frag it all, a few didn't even _realize_ they left the last galaxy until they came online here." The medic subspaced his welder and glared darkly over at the group now breaking up before the gates to the city. "Rook, the gray femme they call a saboteur? Shattered nearly all of the support struts in her right arm. That tank commander of theirs, Warcry? Was so damaged he lost the use of his lower frame for a slagging _stellar cycle_. And as if that wasn't bad enough, that Pit-spawned Praxian XO, Shadowdancer? She was almost in three separate pieces from the sounds of it; her arm only remained attached by the thinnest part of her protoframe holding on to her _entire_ _fragging_ left arm assembly."

He shook his helm in disgust.

"That's not even half of it. A portion of their crew still deactivated from the damage they sustained, including their only medic, and Wheeljack admitted to me they don't even have their fragging _blueprints_."

"Ouch." Ironhide grimaced with pity at the group that broke up and were headed off in different directions. "They ain't gonna like wha' tha earns 'em."

\V/

"Drax, Spotter, Tigerstripe, Refit; you will report to the med bay along with Warcry and myself."

Shadowdancer frowned down at her now limply hanging left arm, ignoring the snickers the braver SPARTANs made at her expense. "

The rest of you," she grinned wickedly as the laughter abruptly cut off, "post battle clean up. Holdout is in charge of ammunition and ordnance with Nitro; Markmaker is in charge of salvageable weaponry. Once one of us cleared by the medics, we will tag one of you to take our place. After were done both on the field and in the med bay, refuel, and recharge."

Some good natured groans answered her, but all but the five other bots called for medical checkups remained with her as the rest headed off to cross the bridge.

"I have a question." Wheeljack blinked innocently at the XO's glower in his direction.

Warcry snorted back his laughter and slapped the slighter mech on the back, nearly knocking him off his pedes. "Haven't you learned your lesson about those yet?"

"Nope, never will either. Ratchet could have told you that." He ignored Drax's low turbine rev, a seeker version of a derisive snort, and looked back to Shadowdancer curiously. "What are you doing to do now?"

She blinked back at him blankly at first.

"Go to the med bay so your Ratchet doesn't blow a gasket." The Praxian gave him a mocking half bow with a sly grin. "If you would be so kind as to lead the way for us poor, confused, and lost bots?"

"Ha, ha, very funny," Wheeljack gave her a flash of blue light anyways for her ribbing as he led them to Iacon's med bay, "not what I meant."

"We know." Warcry smirked at the grimace Shadowdancer made at him behind the inventor's back. "But that needs to be discussed with your commanders and the rest of us first. Some of my soldiers hold the opinion that we have no right to interfere and half just want to get back to what they know best, but we need to know some things before any decision is reached."

"…oh." Given what he now knew about these bots, Wheeljack could understand that. That thought led to another, and ended unsurprisingly in another question. "So, what are you going to tell the bots that ask about your past?"

The dark blue and black trine leader gave another low turbine rev. "The truth, what else?"

"Not exactly," the Praxian flicked her door-wings at Drax to shut him up, "depending on ranks and how we feel about certain bots, different versions... but yes, if you, Warcry, and I feel they can be trusted, the truth to most questions. Obviously," she gave the inventor a shrug and another flick of her door-wings that he didn't see, "we will have to tell the medic most of the truth. It helps that you know and like the medic."

Wheeljack squeaked in surprise as he stopped short and turned to the SPARTANs following him through the base. "Me!"

Refit giggled at the shocked tone in the inventor's vocalizer as Spotter slung a silver painted arm over the slighter mech's shoulders to keep him moving.

"Yes, you, because we trust you not to abuse what you know of us." The seeker patted Wheeljack on the back. "Ratchet, because you trust him, so on and so forth."

"Oh." That made some sense to the inventor. It would explain some of the odd questions that the bots had asked him over the last megacycle. "So... every bot we trust?"

"Only those who need to be told."

Shadowdancer amended as she followed him along the hallways of Iacon, irritably glaring at every bot she could see loitering around just to get a glimpse of the SPARTANs.

"We'll hold a briefing the orn the medics are done with us." She sighed as she pinched the bridge of her olfactory sensor. "Assuming that the medics don't ask us three thousand questions during our maintenance anyways."

\V/

Xenon, Ratchet's mentor for his training vorns and the current Head Officer of the Autobots' Medical Division, listened in with growing amusement at the gossip being shared by the injured soldiers and the medics conducting their repair.

Thankfully, the aftermath of this latest battle had left morale unusually high, which made the post battle repair and maintenance much more pleasant for the medics as a whole.

The current spate of rumors making rounds was all about some special unit that Optimus Prime called in, one that had apparently arrived in the midst of the battle and sent the Decepticons packing fast. It wasn't until Ratchet stormed his way into the med bay did it occur to the elder medic to wonder about how much of the rumors were true and how much was exaggerated, especially about some bot of the unit taking a shotgun blast to the faceplate and being perfectly fine afterwards.

Xenon quickly finished the required repair on his latest patient before following to where his oldest student had corralled two medical berths at the far back of the med bay, the mech himself having just returned from pulling a bin of blank data pads used to record new medical files for individual bots out of the med bay's storage room. "Ratchet? What are you doing?"

The yellow medic gave his mentor a long, level look, obviously striving for patience. "You have heard about that unit that arrived in the middle of the battle, right?"

Xenon nodded warily. Whenever the younger medic sounded that reasonable, he had found a major issue that would require the medics to pull all-cycle shifts to fix. Last time the older medic heard that tone from the younger mech, it had been when a new virus had broken out in the ranks and the medics had been swamped with boosting firewalls and uploading anti-viral software for decacycles.

"The _entire_ Pit-spawned unit; eight- _fragging_ -teen of them, have no blueprints, no _slagging_ records, or even a _glitched up_ maintenance report!" Ratchet dropped the bin of blank pads on a wheeled tool table, trying in vain to calm his angry systems before he overheated something and melted a few wires. " _Primus_ save us, but they admitted that half of the surviving unit had to drop into emergency stasis lock just to make the journey back here!"

The yellow medic kicked the nearest repair berth out of frustration.

The uninjured and newly repaired mechs and femmes immediately fled the med bay, none of them wanted to draw Ratchet's attention when the Head Medic of Iacon was in one of his moods. The remaining injured and the medics quickly relocated to the other end of the bay for the same reason, and Xenon watched them move with a good deal of amusement. "I take it you had to issue your usual threats to... persuade them to visit in a timely manner?"

"I'm not _that_ bad." The yellow medic cycled his vents in exasperation when his mentor just laughed at his claim.

"No, you're not. You are rather pleasant compared to some of the medical personnel we have seen in our functions." The two medics turned to see the seven bots that had just walked through the doors. Shadowdancer had her right hand on an apprehensive Refit's shoulder and the XO gave them both a small smile. "It's a nice change of pace."

Xenon grinned back at the Praxian femme and the slighter pilot shyly smiling before her as Ratchet sputtered in shock behind him. "It's his wonderful berth side manner, right? I'm so proud of how far young Ratchet has come. You know, he once scared a bot into lubricating himself? That was the same orn I met him."

The blue and black femme laughed wickedly as she steered the tan and black femme to one of Ratchet's repair berths.

"I can just imagine. You did some brilliant work with him. I shudder to think what the mech would have said to me earlier without your careful guidance." Wheeljack followed the femmes in, snickering the whole way over the exchange. The four mechs still by the doors exchanged wary looks, but winced when Shadowdancer called out, "I _will_ assist Ratchet in hunting you down!"

Warcry's engine rumbled his discontent, but the tank edged farther into the med bay so the tactician would stop glaring at him. Spotter hesitated a little longer, but ended up walking inside to stand behind Refit, and Drax followed him in, taking a berth across from where Shadowdancer set the pilot. Tigerstripe copied their commander by edging into the room as only far as he thought he could get away with.

Ratchet, after he recovered from the unexpected spate of teasing, half-sparkedly swung at his best friend before taking some of the blank pads and handing them out. "Upload your basic information. Designation, age, frame type, city of origin, any known glitches, and the like."

"We don't know our age; can I just put down fifty plus vorns?" Shadowdancer snatched Refit's pad up when the other femme just gave her a clueless look over the top of it. "We don't know city of origin, either."

She gave a contemplating hum before starting to fill out Refit's basic info as well as her own as far as she knew.

"What? How the frag did you lose track of time?" The yellow medic glared at the Praxian as he waited for an answer.

She flicked her door-wings in apology, but didn't look up. "Been in stasis for vorns, the occasional major malfunction caused us to lose a decacycle here and there, a few lost a full stellar cycle on occasion, and that was well before we got aboard the _ATHENS_. After a while, it just seemed pointless to keep track."

"It wouldn't matter much anyways." Wheeljack patted Refit on the knee joint before pulling a battered and slightly blackened data pad out of his subspace. "Ratch', Xen', I got their basic frame specs."

Neatly diverted, the two medics peered over the inventor's shoulder.

"There's not much here other than..." Xenon trailed off as he noted some of the gross weight measurements Wheeljack had wheedled some of the SPARTANs into. "...how is this 'Warcry' mech _that_ light?"

The trine burst out laughing, and Refit weakly giggled, at the scandalized expression that crossed the tank's face plate. "...am I supposed to answer that?"

"Oh! Er, sorry." The Head of the Autobot Medical Division gave him an embarrassed smile as he straightened up. "No, you don't have to answer that."

Wheeljack snickered as he took Refit's data pad from the tactician and uploaded her basic frame specs.

"You each will take a few joors, even with the short cut I have." He blinked before giving a guilty pulse of purple light. "Well... for the uninjured ones, anyways. No real way to tell how long the others will take."

Ratchet cycled his vents in another bid for patience as he took Wheeljack's old pad and the Praxian's proffered one.

"Then we had best get started, right 'jack?" He shot an arched look to the silver and white seeker still standing behind the tan and black femme. "And you're fragging standing there... why?"

"Er... you would consider him Refit's creator." Shadowdancer shrugged as she started to help the yellow medic remove the armor on her still unresponsive left arm. "He's a little... protective."

"Ah, well then." Ratchet shot the seeker a sadistic grin. "Xenon, would you start with the proud creator? I know you always wanted to look at a seeker's system."

\V/

Windcharger and Hubcap were hunched over a console in the communications room when Sentinel Prime passed by, both snickering about something on the vid screen.

The older Prime had caught up on his data work while the battle outside was fought, and he couldn't conceive of anything about defending one's home from Decepticons being amusing. He took a few steps into the room, intent on berating the two for watching entertainment vids while on duty, when he glanced at the vid screen and lost his line of processing.

That... that _was_ outside of Iacon, he could even reason that it was a vid of the recent battle, but the rest of it...

"Who are these bots?" Windcharger paused the recorded vid on a shot of the last three jumping out of their half visible transport and into the battle below.

Hubcap shrugged and leaned back in his chair. "Dunno. Rumor has it that Wheeljack found 'em first outside 'o what's left 'o Kalis, 'em and that transport 'o theirs. Prowl and Jazz ran into 'em next, and the bots volunteered ta bring 'em mechs back."

"Huh. Well, I like them anyways." The younger communications specialist tapped the vid screen as his superior chuckled at the sight of Blitzwing being knocked out of the sky.

Sentinel silently backed out of the room. He had let Optimus send off his new saboteur and Zeta's promising mech off on what he thought would be a pointless chase through a destroyed city, figuring he could use the failure as a lesson on risky decisions and the cost to a leader's power base and respectability.

But if the younger Prime's gambit had actually paid off...

\V/

Spotter and Refit were discharged from the med bay first… or rather, the femme was cleared first and hung around watching the medics work until the silver and white seeker finished his checkup. Tigerstripe took the pilot's berth as Warcry traded with Spotter.

The two passed Rook and Silentforce on their way to the med bay, but the seeker steered the femme on when she wanted to stall from returning to the _ATHENS_ by chatting with the saboteur for a bit.

Halfway between the med bay and Iacon's main gate, the two were approached by a red painted mech. "Excuse me. May I have a word?"

"Sure!" Always ready to socialize, Refit beamed up at the mech.

Spotter was less than enthusiastic over the suggestion. The red mech had the same air of the self-important paper pushers he had the misfortune to meet in the Milky Way Galaxy. "...about?"

Mentally tallying the femme as a few too many bytes short of a full terabyte, Sentinel Prime looked to the strange seeker that could walk as normally as any ground bound bot. "I am Sentinel Prime. I have a few questions about the bots you showed up with."

Refit bounced on her pedes, ready to brag about the soldiers that she had personally looked after for almost ten vorns, but the silver seeker clamped a hand on the femme's shoulder and steered her away.

"I'm sorry, but our commanding officers gave us orders to refuel and recharge immediately after getting checked out by the medics. You should wait for one of them to get done; they will be about a breem or so." Without waiting for an answer, Spotter pushed the ex-AI farther on down the hall until they were out of sight of the red mech.

She waited until her 'creator' removed his hand, her signal that it was okay to once again ask questions.

"Why did you do that?" Refit was very confused over the seeker's misdirection. "Neither Warcry or Shadowdancer will be done for another few joors; our XO will most likely be first to leave."

She gave the snickering Spotter besides her a long, searching look.

"You manipulated it so he would be irritated, and Shadowdancer doesn't care for those who give her an attitude."

The recon scout sighed as he gave the femme a one armed hug. "Yes, I did. Why? Because apparently there are similarities between politicians in this galaxy and our last."

"'Politicians'..." _Those_ had been mentioned in Dr. Halsey's note to her, as one of the reasons why the SPARTANs had chosen to leave their home galaxy. "I think I hate politicians."

"So, no hard feelings about leaving him for Shadowdancer to handle?"

"Nope, none." Good mood restored, Refit wondered if she could cite post-flight checks as a reason to stall her recharge until one of the femmes got back to the _ATHENS_.

\V/

Sentinel Prime had tried to question three other non-Autobot bots before he finally met one Shadowdancer, Covert Operations Tactician and the SPARTAN-Bots' Executive Officer. The Praxian femme gave him a long look before sighing, door-wings drooping slightly in exhaustion as she rubbed her optics with one hand. "Is there any way this can wait a few joors?"

"No, it cannot." Flustered, no bot had ever bluntly ignored him before and the last two he had tried to question had done just that, Sentinel reached out to poke the femme as he opened his mouth components to demand some answers.

Shadowdancer grabbed his hand before spinning him around and shoving him into a wall. She had no patience for _anything_ after Ratchet had finished yelling at her about the damage he had found in her left shoulder assembly.

"Mind your manners, mech! Or I will rip your arm off and beat you in to scrap metal with it! Now," she forcibly cycled her vents to calm herself, "what is so important that you feel you have to accost every solider of mine that you see?"

"I-I am a Prime!" Nearly at his wit's end, Sentinel fell back to what usually worked. "You just attacked a Prime!"

The femme stared him down with narrowed optics. "At the risk of sounding as petulant as you do now, you started it."

Snickering and a few choked back laughs alerted the two that they were not alone anymore. Elita One and Zeta were standing in the front of a loose group that had gathered to watch Sentinel make a spectacle of himself.

"Lay off Sentinel." Elita took the Praxian by the arm plates and led her off pass the mech. "They dropped what they were doing just to come here and help us. You could at least wait until they can recharge before you pester them."

"She is right, though." Zeta gave the older Prime a sweet smile as she followed her fellow femmes. "You're acting like a youngling."

The SPARTAN tactician waited until the pink and white femme had 'escorted' her closer to the gates before twitching her lip plates into a smirk and inspecting both femmes. "I see he wasn't the only bot lying in wait for me."

"Very true. But you do look tired, even your door-wings are sagging." Elita patted the other femme on the arm she was holding as she let go. "We can chat later."

Shadowdancer blinked a bit before returning her smile slyly.

"That might be sooner than you think." She waved a hand as she walked off. "Have a good off-cycle, femmes."

Zeta tilted her helm as she watched the other tactician leave. "Wonder what she meant by that?"

\V/

Ratchet frowned into the inside of Rook's right forearm.

Like the last 'SPARTAN' he had looked at, Shadowdancer, she had the same lightweight but strong carbon-ceramic mix making up her support structure instead of a purely metallic alloy. Unlike the Praxian, she had cracks and fractures riddling the supports making up her _right_ arm assembly instead of her left shoulder joint and the connecting pieces.

The medic reached in with a pair of tongs and broke a piece of shattered strut off to analyze at later. "I won't be able to fix this until 'jack can make whatever this slag is in his lab."

The femme, stripped of her armor and apparently unconcerned over the small fact that he had just pulled a part of her structural support struts apart, shrugged her left shoulder while holding her right completely still for him. A skill that many bots the medic looked at regularly had failed to learn over the vorns.

"I've waited this long, a few more orns won't kill me." Rook leaned over and peered into her arm before he started reaching for her armor plates. "Huh."

"What?" Subspaceing the piece of carbide laced ceramic; Ratchet began to help the femme back into her armor.

"Looks a lot better than the last time I saw it." Rook tactfully left out the part where the sight of her bones had been jutting out of her armor on some backwater planet being the last time she saw her own skeleton and started to reattach the plates that covered her right hand. "Last time I saw a medic, they told me it was in twenty-three pieces and would take a few... decacycles for it to heal on its own."

The yellow medic flinched at the news, but silently continued with re armoring her shins. It wasn't the first time one of these SPARTANs had spoken up with a comment or two that made his medical programing protest in complete horror. He now had a very large processor ache growing behind his optics as consequence. "Right, you're done."

He picked up the data pad that now contained the start of Rook's medical file and watched the femme try to leave only to be stopped by the mech she came into the med bay with. The metallic red and black mech silently held out a hand and Rook pouted, but piled up the medical tools she had filched from under the medic's sensors and flounced out the door in a huff.

Wheeljack started to laugh, blue lights flashing from where he was sitting and mapping out Tigerstripe's thrusters for the locations of his fuel lines and motor relay systems. "How much did she get, Silentforce?"

The stoic mech showed the inventor the rather large pile before starting to return them to where Ratchet had them before the light fingered femme tried to make off with them. The medic blinked in surprise before checking to see if the saboteur had tried to steal anything else. "You two fraggers could have warned me she would do that."

"I could have, sure," Wheeljack shrugged as he updated the big seeker's record, "but there is a reason he's called Silentforce."

Ratchet gave his next patient a searching look. The mech sighed though his vents, shrugged, then opened his mouth components. Wheeljack, Tigerstripe, and Silentforce had already deactivated their audio receptors; so only Ratchet flinched from the buzzing static screech the mech emitted from his faulty vocalizer.

"Frag... sorry." Silentforce shrugged again before snagging one of the blank data pads and starting to fill it out. The medic threw his still snickering friend a glare before heading to the office he shared with his mentor. "I'll be right back."

He found Xenon seated at his desk, paging through one of the newly started medical records of the SPARTAN-Bots, and the older medic waved the younger over. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"

Ratchet slotted Rook's file into the data case against the wall before heading over to see what had the Autobots' CMO so interested.

"You mean other than the fact that their protoframes are tinted blue, the backup for the backup motor control system," the medic cast a quick glance to see which bot his mentor was looking at, "the fact they are all lighter than they should be, the small matter of having too much draw on their power supply and _still_ being able to refuel less than any other Cybertronian I've ever seen, or... what... the... _frag_? How did you..."

"Asking them really nicely." The older medic chuckled as he set the pad down. "You would be surprised how well that works."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell that to the bots that like to stave off their checkups." Ratchet snatched up the pad to see if Xenon had found anything else he hadn't. "How much do you want to bet that slagging engineer already knows about all of this?"

The older medic leaned back in his chair as he thought about how the inventor had clumsily distracted them both from asking about both their age and origin. "Not that much, but I would wager a hefty amount of high grade that he knows more than we do."

"Humph." The younger medic decided that if his friend didn't come clean soon, he would make him. "'jack's got until we're done to tell me, then I'm welding him to a chair."

"I'll even help." The Autobots' CMO ignored the startled look that earned him from the Head Medic of Iacon as he got to his pedes. "But for right now? We still have more patients."

Ratchet hesitated before following his mentor out of the office they both shared; deftly slotting Warcry's newly started medical record home in the data case next to Shadowdancer's as he left.

Xenon headed for a mech named Quickgrip as the younger medic took the data pad Silentforce held out to him. "Right, let's see if I can figure out what is malfunctioning in your vocalizer."


	5. Chapter 5

The two Autobot medics and the lone inventor assisting them finished their cycle's work on the SPARTAN-Bots not much longer after Quickgrip had left with a passing remark to Xenon, Ratchet, and Wheeljack. He informed them that the rest of the 'Covert Ops' would be the first on what he called the 'chopping block' early next orn, who would be escorted to the med bay by their XO and another officer.

Wheeljack distractedly waved goodbye to the gray and black mech over his shoulder, tidying up his notes on the massive seeker's frame, Tigerstripe. Ratchet raised an optic ridge at his mentor, who cast a quick look around at the empty medical bay before nodding sharply at the unasked question of his fellow medic.

"Hey, 'jack." The yellow mech slung his arm over his best friend's shoulder plates, steering the only-half processing green and white mech in the direction of the med bay medics' office. "We found something really neat that I want to show you."

Optics and processor locked on the work he just finished, Wheeljack made an absent sounding hum as he looked over Tigerstripe's medical file, following along with where his friend led him blindly. Xenon wandered into the office behind the two, calmly closing the office door in case some bot wandered in needing repairs.

Ratchet snatched Warcry's medical file off the data case, flipped the data pad to what the CMO had showed him earlier, and shoved it in front of Tigerstripe's in the inventor's view. "Neat, huh?"

Wheeljack blinked blankly, then all but dropped his nearly finished data pad to take a closer look at the one Ratchet was holding. "Whoa, that's so cool! Who's is this?"

Xenon delicately snatched Tigerstripe's medical file from the inventor's loosened grip before it could fall to the ground. "That is the medical record I compiled on one 'Warcry', the SPARTAN-Bots' Commanding Officer."

"Err..." Shuffling his pedes as he shifted in place nervously, Wheeljack looked from one medic to the other. Both pinned him with an expectant look. "...I don't know anything about this. All I did was take a few looks as I worked up armor sets for them. They only recently told me that... uh, that a few _unusual_ things had happened to them."

He looked back to the medical file, paging through the rest of it.

"I knew about the odd tint to their protoframes, and I know what some of these odd systems are, or at least what they do, and the optimized system layout, but I didn't know about the rest."

"That... is very fragging _vague_ , 'jack." Ratchet frowned darkly at his friend, who gave him a guilty pulse of purple and violet light.

The inventor shook his helm, giving both medics an apologetic and beseeching look in addition to the color spilling from his vocalizer fins.

"It's not my secret to tell." He winced and took a few steps back when the Head Medic of Iacon took a step forward, still glaring. "They- _she_ only recently told me some of it, and said they would trust you because I do!"

Xenon raised a hand, forestalling his oldest student from making his threat a reality by welding his best friend to their office equipment. "Who is 'she', Wheeljack?"

"Um... Shadowdancer, their Third in Command." The green and white mech warily peered up to his medically inclined friend. "Are you still mad with me?"

Ratchet cycled his vents in exasperation, raising a hand to rub at the side of his helm where his processor ache was coming back vigorously.

"No. I can't really fragging argue with that logic." The yellow medic walked to the other side of the office and snagged a few cubes of high grade out of his lowest desk drawer, setting two them on the desk before sprawling out in his chair tiredly. "Sit."

The Autobots' CMO chuckled ruefully as he passed the nonplussed inventor and picked up one of the cubes before sitting down behind his own desk to deal with the data work their faction's Medical Division generated every megacycle.

Wheeljack looked between them in confusion, then shrugged and sat where his best friend had ordered him to. "So, I'm off whatever hook I was on?"

"Yes, you're no longer on one," Xenon took a sip of the special Praxus brewed high grade his student only rarely dipped into unless overly stressed, "patient to medic confidentiality is a very persuasive argument to us. You were their only acting medic from what young Refit told us; therefore you do have the right to hold their silence with what they trusted you with."

"Oh... yay me?" The green and white finally took up his own cube of high grade, giving his best friend a salute with the cube. "If it makes you feel any better, Shadow said she would tell the rest of you once you're done with the others. I think she wants to know if there are any other major malfunctions before they start to figure out what to do now."

"Terrific. That still doesn't give me slagging much to tell our Primes and the other officers in the meeting in a few breems."

The yellow medic groaned as the processor ache that had been building all through the SPARTAN-Bots' maintenance check started pounding behind his optics. He took a bracing draught of his high grade before leaning forward and setting his helm and cube on his desk, trying to sort enough of his processors to reduce the ache in them.

"They are unlike any other glitched up Cybertronians I've ever worked on; some of their systems are downright fragging _dangerous_ to install but every last bit of it has the look of their _original_ slagging systems; and oh yeah, I don't know a fragging thing about them, despite hearing snippets of their past medical checks that makes my _Primus blessed_ medic's programming protest _violently!_ "

The Autobots' CMO chuckled again at the plaintive whine audible in his oldest student's vocalizer. "Wheeljack, what did Shadowdancer say about telling the rest of us?"

"That she and the others would tell you the orn you're done with the last of their soldiers." The inventor gave them both a flash of blue light, but his vocalizer fins faded to a pale green color after a bare astrosecond. "You will not like _any_ of what you'll hear when they do tell you. Trust me. The very little they got though with me was... disturbing enough."

" _You're_ not _helping_ , 'jack." Ratchet thumped his desk with his helm in time to his words, catching the sight of his friend's colorful light of unease when he raised his helm.

A silent breem passed as the three thought over their own issues; Wheeljack thinking about what he had been told and what he was keeping from the medics, the twinge in Ratchet's processors grew even more blinding as he contemplated what the next officers' meeting would hold for him, and Xenon watched the two with quiet amusement as he thought about younger bots and their frequent impatience with everything.

\V/

Trickflip shifted from his eavesdropping position in one of the dark corners of the med bay. He had been given orders to ensure that the SPARTANs' trust in the inventor hadn't been misplaced, and from the sound of it, it hadn't.

The infiltrator regarded the doors standing between him and his berth on the _ATHENS_.

Since the medics and Wheeljack were in their office, the door was programmed to chime whenever it was opened. He needed to leave without alerting the medics, but unless he wanted to wait for some bot to enter needing repairs or for the medical officers to leave for whatever meeting they had, he was stuck where he was.

It was at the point where he was wondering if he could hack the door controls with his admittedly meager human hacking skills without setting off any alarms, making a mental note to ask Spotter for _Cybertronian_ hacking tips, when Shadowdancer pinged his internal comms. { _When you're done there, ask Wheeljack if he wants his berth on the ATHENS or if he has a room in the Autobot base._ }

{ _Ma'am, I could kiss you._ } Trickflip smirked wickedly even as the tactician retaliated for the comment, abruptly increasing his data link with her then cutting it off to its previous level to cause the infiltrator wince at the sudden pressure in his processors. { _Needed a reason to be in their medical repair bay._ }

{ _You're an aft, one-nine-six. Hurry it up, one-four-four is being an idiot again, and I need you to distract him._ } Wry amusement colored the XO's tone, taking the sting out of her previous reprimand.

Walking to the door, Trickflip let his comm link with Shadowdancer go as he triggered the doors to open and deactivated his stealth system before Wheeljack peered out of the office at him as a chime rang through the med bay.

"Hiya, Trick! What's up?" The inventor inspected the grime smeared armor of the other mech. "You don't look like some bot took a chunk out of you... although, you need a wash."

Wheeljack had heard some of the SPARTANs threaten each other with that phrase before, and it still amused him to hear and use it.

Shrugging dismissively, the infiltrator cautiously waved to the grumpy yellow medic that appeared over the mech's shoulder, concerned by what his friend had said to whoever it was now standing in the med bay. "I know, but Shadow wants to know if you have a berth here or if you need the room you have on the _ATHENS_."

"I normally rent a room at one of the lodges in the city, but if you all don't mind putting up with me for a little while longer, I'll stay with you." The inventor gave his best friend a pulse of blue light as he headed for the bigger mech standing in the open doorway. "I'll see you next cycle, Ratch'. Bye, Xen'!"

Ratchet frowned in a puzzled way as the acid green and black mech gave him a bow before following Wheeljack out of the med bay. "Xenon, I didn't hear the chime in the office sound a visitor."

The older medic looked up from his data pad of mundane work orders that had to pass through the Autobots' CMO before being approved with a measure of surprise. "Neither did I. Why?"

"We just had one. 'jack never did explain what those extra systems were, did he?" The Head Medic of Iacon gave his mentor a puzzled look. "Can you compare Mirage's cloaking system and Shadowdancer's unknown ones?"

"Of course. Can I ask what you are thinking, or will doing the work explain?" Xenon got up and pulled the Praxian femme's file and the Special Ops spy's record from the data case, pulling up the requested files before setting them both on Ratchet's desk.

The younger medic remained silent as he compared the systems of the two different bots, before plucking Rook's, Drax's, and Spotter's files and setting them next to the two he requested and compared them. "Anything look familiar?"

"Cloaking systems?" The CMO frowned at the differences in the systems. "They are not strictly the same. Mirage projects a field that hides his frame and the space around him, the SPARTANs have whatever this system is lacing their proto frame and linked to their armor, and this one that looks more similar but only linked into their protoframes. Think one or the other has the same effect without sharing many similarities?"

"But it _is_ somewhat similar, right?" Ratchet tapped his fingers on his desk as he thought it out. "They don't project a field that conceals them, and if what I think is right, they actually conceal _themselves_ , not just an envelope of space around them."

Xenon raised an optic ridge at that line of processing. "You think our not so random visitor was hiding in the med bay? Yet again, why?"

"I highly doubt it was us they wanted." Frowning down at the medical files in confusion, the younger medic reviewed what little he knew about the strange bots. "I'm thinking they wanted something else."

"One almost made away with some of your tools, they might have needed to borrow your welder." The CMO smirked at the irritated rev from his fellow medic. "Maybe they just wanted to ensure Wheeljack was safe here."

The yellow medic glared at his mentor. "Ha, ha, so slagging funny."

He gave another rev, this one more bemused than angry, before stacking the pads up and returning them where they had been before they two pulled them down.

"And that doesn't make any sense. Why would they worry over Wheeljack? I love the mech like a spark brother, but they've only known the Pit-spawn for a megacycle." He rubbed the side of his helm again, his aching processor protesting its current use on puzzling out the mentality of the new bots, before cycling his vents as he stored away the information to puzzle over later. "If we don't leave now, were going to be late for the slagging meeting with the Primes and the other officers."

"And would that would be so bad?" Xenon cast a longing look to his half-finished cube of high grade as Ratchet smirked at him.

"It'll keep. Let's go," the yellow medic pulled his mentor out of the office and through the med bay, "if I have to be there, so do you."

\V/

Wheeljack visited the _ATHENS_ ' rec room with Trickflip in tow, who wandered off to the table that the Covert Ops bots were gathered around and struck up a conversation with a mech that had a darker painted version of the infiltrator's own colors, one he hadn't seen much of. The inventor got himself a cube of the SPARTANs' mid-grade before seating himself in one of the battered couches to watch a rare moment when most of the bots were all in the same room together.

He watched as Rook left the Covert Ops table and started pouting at Silentforce, who flatly ignored her to listen to Refit as she chatted away happily about something that had happen during the cycle. Shadowdancer was bent almost in half over a spare data pad with Warcry, Holdout, and Markmaker in a table situated in the corner.

Somehow Spotter had pulled one of the consoles out of a wall and was busy with some program as his trine mates lounged somewhere nearby, Tigerstripe was sitting almost at the slighter seeker's pedes next to the wall and Drax sat by himself at the table closest to the Covert Ops table with a clear view of his trine mates.

Quickgrip and Galeforce were swapping stories about something, what little the inventor could hear made no sense to him but seemed to be something about their respective jobs in the SPARTAN-Bot unit.

Wandering in a little late; Clearsight looked around the room before getting her own cube of energon and snagging a seat on the other side of the pilot, engaging the saboteur in a story of her own to draw the other femme's attention from the silent mech, who shot her a grateful look as he nodded to whatever the slightest femme in the SPARTAN ranks had asked of him.

An argument between Knightblade and Nitro had to be broken up by Titan when the two looked ready to start becoming violent.

Shadowdancer abruptly sat upright; drawing attention when she flapped her door-wings in irritation and the two arguing bots curtly broke off and headed off in different directions.

Wheeljack raised an optic ridge at the incident. It wasn't the first time the XO had stopped some action with a slight movement. In fact, the inventor could recall several times when a bot or two had stopped either in mid-sentence or mid-action at a twitch or slight movement from the four now sitting in the corner or a few of the others.

Adding that tidbit to his list of questions to be asked once he built up the courage to, he looked up inquiringly when the tan and gray Praxian sat next to him.

Nitro gave him a small smile as he sank into the minor amount of padding the couch still held on to.

"I've been banished to the corner until I learn to be polite to those that don't share my enthusiasm for demolitions." The mech smirked wickedly as he looked over across the room to where the sniper had removed herself to. "Knight has a time out until she learns not to yell when she doesn't agree with others."

"Is the _ATHENS_ the universes' very own sparkling sitting service for soldier bots?" The inventor gave a pulse of blue light as the other Praxian laughed at the crack on them.

"You wouldn't think that highly trained soldiers would act like younglings off the field of battle, would you?" Nitro slyly smirked again at the XO as she shot him a mildly disapproving look before bending back to her work in the corner with the other officers of the SPARTAN-Bots. "We have long since figured out that a lot of us can't share the same space for very long without having a bigger overreaching goal to concentrate on. We get... irritable and jumpy after a while, even with each other."

The green and white mech looked around again at the soldiers filling the room. Now that it had been pointed out to him, he could see the unusual amount of tension and wary looks the bots tossed around, even in somewhere that should have been considered safe. "So, you all will be leaving soon?"

Wheeljack couldn't quite keep the pout out of his vocalizer. They were an _interesting_ mix of bots, to say the least.

"That's what they're doing over there," the Praxian nodded to the four in the corner, "assigning a SPARTAN to a city so we don't end up tearing each other apart or damaging parts of Iacon with a brawl or two, but there _is_ a possibility that not all of us are leaving."

At the inventor's hopeful look, the demolitions specialist inclined his helm.

"If everything goes as Shadow thinks it will, War, Gale, 'fit, and the trine will remain with the _ATHENS_ here."

"If she thinks it will? Whatever could go wrong?" Wheeljack flashed orange from his vocalizer fins to show that he had been sarcastic when asking the question. "I really don't think you have much to worry about, though. The Autobots are supposed to stand for freedom and individual choice. Optimus Prime won't argue about whatever you're planning on doing, as long as you don't join the Decepticons wholesale."

"It's not Optimus we are worried about, both our commanding officers like him and Ultra Magnus." Nitro twitched his door-wings curiously and frowned, puzzled, at the answering violent jerk from the tactician's. "Shadow ran into Sentinel Prime, and had a bit of an issue with him. She won't tell us what she did or said, but she really doesn't think much of him. Neither did Spotter for that matter, and all Refit would say about it is that she hates politicians."

The inventor blinked for a moment before snickering. "Refit actually hates something? She doesn't seem to be a very hateful type of bot."

Looking over to where the pilot was holding court in the middle of the rec room, he laughed again as the bubbly femme waved her arms as she described something to a small group of five SPARTANs, Titan and Galeforce having joined the table while he had been chatting with the demolitions specialist.

Nitro smirked himself as he watched the same scene unfolding.

"Might have something to do with how she was programmed." His attention was snagged by the officers breaking up from their corner. "Time for us to hit the berth, 'jack."

\V/

Xenon entered a council room under Iacon with Ratchet, nodding to Zeta and Ether already seated at the table situated in the middle of the large room.

The Head Tactician softly smiled at the medics as they took their seats across from her and the Head of Special Ops, who only nodded at them as he glanced up from his data pad.

"So, since you two have spent the most time with our guests, what are they like?"

The Autobots CMO's frame gave a hiss of his hydraulics as he leaned back in his chair. "Unusual. A real batch of characters, and we are only half done."

" _Fragging glitched,_ the lot of them." The Head Medic of Iacon frowned at his mentor's laugh, then answered the question Zeta was about to ask without her having to actually state it. "One of the femmes tried to make off with my slagging tools earlier, and would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for a mech with a glitch somewhere in his vocalizer or processor that prevents him from using it. They both filled out the 'what is your glitch' part of their records, Rook's apparently a fragging kleptomaniac, and Silentforce put down a mechanical vocalizer failure for his."

Ratchet rubbed his optics as he pulled a data pad containing a general overview of the bots he had met so far and the medical reports for the orn out of his subspace.

"I'm not exaggerating, either. Most of them so far have listed something for a glitch, either a medical one or a Pit-be-damned personality malfunction."

"So they're either incredibly honest or trying to warn us." Ether set his data pad down with a clack and gave the medics his full attention. He had been rereading the report Jazz had given him about his quick look around the SPARTAN-Bots' transport, the _UNSC ATHENS,_ and the abrupt halt caused by two of them on the sub deck. "I've never known any glitched bot to willingly inform others that they are, indeed, glitched."

Ratchet shrugged as Ultra Magnus and Sentinel Prime walked into the room, followed closely by Optimus Prime and Elita One. "At least I won't just fragging learn of it when they start acting up."

The younger Prime blinked at him as he held out a chair for Ultra Magnus' lieutenant, earning him a grateful look from the pink and white femme. "What are you four talking about?"

"That unit of eighteen bots you miraculously summoned out of subspace." Xenon smiled at the chuckle Optimus gave over that wild rumor as he took a seat next to a now frowning Sentinel. "Most of them do have the expected minor malfunctions of bots that travel far outside of Cybertron's solar system. A few have some glitch or another that they must have been sparked with."

"They are malfunctioning?" Elita blinked, optics wide, as she thought over her brief contact with the electric blue and black Praxian. "Didn't seem like it. I met that wicked looking femme, Shadowdancer, with Zeta and Sentinel after the battle, and she didn't look anything other than _really_ tired."

The yellow medic huffed at her in irritation, before pulling up a file and uploading it to the council table's computer, displaying the list he had made about what little personality he saw in the bots and a few of the more major glitches for the other officers arrayed around the table.

"Shadowdancer, who is their fragging 3IC for some reason despite being the second highest ranking officer, is more than a little borderline _mechicidal_ , which is correctable with the proper psychological synapse work, but she also has a slagging obsessive compulsive disorder, having to do with the proper order of what she comes into contact with. _She_ told _me_ that, and most of these SPARTAN-Bots that visited the med bay agreed with her over the fact that she is more than just a little violent and loves to rearrange things, including my tools and the layout of her fragging armor that I removed. Rook," the Head Medic of Iacon switched the holographic display to show the saboteur's notes, "is a Pit-spawned kleptomaniac, she slagging steals compulsively."

Zeta tilted her helm to the side as she thought through what she knew about the two femmes.

"So their 3IC, who happens to be their tactician, has a glitch that requires her to organize everything. I'm going to assume that includes her tactical plans and Intelligence she works them from. Their saboteur will compulsively steal anything and everything not bolted down, even if it doesn't look like it would be important." She started to laugh wildly. "It sounds like their glitches are optimized for their job class, doesn't it?"

Tapping his fingers on the edge of the table, Ether had to nod in agreement. "An incredibly ordered tactician and a light-fingered saboteur, I would have to agree. Any other glitches so far?"

"Just physical ones," Ratchet set his helm on his hand, elbow joint resting on the table, "like that mech Silentforce who can't use his vocalizer for some reason. There are a lot of old injuries and damages that look like they've been there for _vorns_. None of them can recall their current age, and I want the _fragging port exhausts_ of whatever medics they saw before."

He tossed his data pad onto the table in a fit of pique.

"We only got through half of them, the rest are getting checked out next cycle, but that's not the only point of interest."

"They have a very... unique frame type, composition, and some systems we can't puzzle out." Xenon uploaded his part of the medical review on the council room's display, a general overview of a Cybertronian frame overlaid by the notes he and his oldest student had compiled together about the SPARTAN-Bots. "Their structural supports are made out of an extremely lightweight ceramic mix."

Ratchet pulled out the piece he had taken out of Rook and slid it across the table to Zeta to look at and pass around.

"Which either matches or exceeds the alloys currently used in new Cybertronian construction. Their protoframes are tinted blue, they don't even know what alloy they are built out of, and every question was met with either a shrug or a suggestion to ask a mech named Galeforce. All of them have a backup for a backup motor control system." The CMO leaned back in his chair again after taking back the loose frame piece of Rook's. "All of them still have their original parts, a few systems we can guess at, a few systems we can't figure the use out of, and are built in such a way that there are little to no excess systems besides the backups."

The older medic chuckled at the incredulous looks aimed either at him or the information he had displayed.

"Those 'Covert Ops' type bots are also built to cancel out any betraying sounds their systems give off. It's possible to hear them coming, but would require a bot with excessively sensitive audio receptors calibrated for picking up the minute sounds."

Ether held up a hand to prevent the conversation from continuing, reaching with his other for the report he had just been reading to add some information to the medic's Intel. "Jazz reported they had a stealth system built in. Two of the seeker trine, and about five or so of the ground bound bots. He also made the remark that it was harder to spot them than our spy Mirage, but still possible as long as there is a lot of light to visibly see the ripples their 'optical camouflage' gives off."

"I can confirm that." Inclining his helm, Ratchet pulled up the second to last points he and his mentor had found out so far. "This is what we think is Rook's stealth system."

He pointed out the system hooked up to the femme's protoframe and the points it connected to her armor.

"Instead of projecting a field like that ex-aristocratic, I think she and the other bots change the look of either _themselves_ or their _armor_ , avoiding the issue of Mirage's where a Decepticon could spot him by looking for a blob of distortion in their field of view." The Head Medic of Iacon looked around the table before pulling up Warcry's general system overview. "That's not the last of it. What does this look like to you?"

Elita tilted her helm to the side in confusion, Zeta and Ether frowned thoughtfully, but Magnus straightened up in his chair with some alarm. "That's a generator."

Optimus looked from the Military Commander to the SPARTA-Bots' Commanding Officer's systems. "But that is where his spark chamber is supposed to be."

"You're both right." Xenon sat up straighter in his chair and leaned forward as if telling a secret. "It's possible, but incredibly dangerous to install for both the bot getting it and the medics installing it."

"They don't have to refuel as often, or as much, as the bots in their frame class." Now, the younger medic frowned at his mentor for his making light of the possible problems the SPARTANs had. "But like we said, it's all their original fragging systems. Nothing has the look of being upgraded or installed after being sparked, and that's not _slagging possible_ , because generator spark chambers would have to be installed after a Cybertronian is sparked, and it would fit around a spark chamber instead of _being_ it. All attempts to do it the way these Pit-spawned bots seemed to be built ended when the generator exploded when induced with a new spark."

"So, they are walking bombs." Sentinel's frown deepened, but both medics shook their helms at the older Prime.

"Only if you take in account temperament to your assumptions." Magnifying the view of Warcry's systems, the CMO pointed out the safety features in the generator. "Like any other Cybertronian, they do have the possibility of exploding due to critical system failures, but unless these bots attach a incendiary grenade to the very outer edge of their spark chamber or generator chamber, however you want to call it, this system here would prevent any explosion from a generator's cascading reactor failure and meltdown from anything less than a penetrating point blank shot to the very middle of their chassis."

"That would puncture the glitched bots' energon pump, which all of them seem to have _right slagging_ there, and the spilled energon would do the incendiary grenade's work." Ratchet started to laugh wickedly. "Which isn't possible unless they stood _really fragging still_ and let a Pit-spawned bot shoot at them for a bit."

Xenon tilted his helm to his oldest student in agreement and answered the unspoken question from the other Autobot officers. "They have a type of short lived shielding that they can turn on and off. I burned the tips of my fingers on it when a mech by the name of Quickgrip failed to turn it off before I reached out to remove some of his armor."

Sentinel kept frowning at the two, as he disliked any reminder of the incident he had with the SPARTAN-Bots' XO. "So, you know they are glitched, incredibly violent, have been excessively customized since being sparked, and that's it?"

"Pretty fragging much," the younger medic, sitting back in his chair now that most of the work was done, frowned back, "but Wheeljack said they would go over their Pit of a history with a few of us later, once they had the time to get the rest of their bots checked out and sort a few things out with each other. I took from his statement that both Xen' and I were invited to their little slagging meeting, and that we would not like whatever they have to say for themselves."

"Shadowdancer said the same to me and Zeta." Elita tilted her helm to the Head of Tactical. "Something about chatting sooner than we thought."

The younger Prime raised an optic ridge at Magnus, who nodded back.

"We were told the same by Warcry, before they gathered after the battle." Optimus vented hard, wondering what it was the SPARTANs though they needed to tell him and the other officers, before uploading his part of work for the officer's meeting. "So that will take care of itself later, or at least resolve into another issue. Do any of you have other news to share before we start?"

\V/

Shadowdancer groaned as her systems rebooted from recharge quickly, and she turned over in her berth and right onto one of her door-wings before she onlined an optic to glare at her _very_ early in the cycle visitor. " _Refit_... what do you _want_?"

The pilot gave her a small nervous smile, peering around the XO's door frame as the taller femme sat up to get her weight off what Ratchet had told her were also called 'sensory panels'. "I want to see more of Iacon and these Autobots, but you said I needed to have an escort in order to leave the _ATHENS_ , so... can you come with me?"

"Wha-? Oh... yeah." The Praxian cycled her vents tiredly as she got up, giving up any hope of returning to her recharge cycle.

Having been working on her own projects and duties until late last off-cycle she had gotten very little recharge, but it was nothing she wasn't well used to. She twitched and fluttered her door-wings to get rid of the ache she got from rolling over onto one and walked after the bubbly femme as she all but bounced to the stairwell leading to the lower level.

Rubbing at her optics, she nodded to Quickgrip, who had taken the off-cycle shift of guard duty and was just now coming off his shift and heading for his own berth after trading off with Silentforce.

Refit cheerfully bounced out of the _ATHENS',_ the shield that concealed the ship, and across the flat plane before Iacon's moat, a moody tactician who was dearly wishing the other femme had grabbed her so called creator for this little expedition of hers following along in her wake. She trilled a greeting to some of the vaguely familiar soldiers stationed at the main gate, stopping to chat with a few as Shadowdancer blearily walked up.

Darting off again once the Autobots let them through after a customary inspection, the ex-AI slowed down only when she got to the road leading to the Autobot base. Then she turned around to admire the way the tactician was able to walk with her optics at half power while still managing to avoid other bots on the streets at the same time.

Once the two got just inside of the base, Shadowdancer's lip plates twitched into a small smile of her own, confusing the younger femme. "'fit, you might want to watch were you're going."

"Why? I-oomph!" Refit walked backwards into some bot and almost fell forward when the bot she walked into caught her and carefully turned her around to see what had walked into him.

Jazz smirked at the surprised look on the femme's face plate, carefully noting that Shadowdancer was frowning at him for holding onto the tan and black femme. "Sup, 'fit? Good orn ta ya too."

"Heh, sorry Jazz..." Refit gave him a thankful smile as she regained her balance and he let go. "We're exploring, want to help show me around?"

"Love ta, femme." The silver saboteur saluted the tactician before gesturing to Prowl, who was glaring in an annoyed way at his back plates. "But, ah got mah job ta do, first. Gim'meh bout ah half ah joor, an ah'd be happy ta."

Shadowdancer nodded to Jazz and flicked a Praxian salutation to Prowl. "She'll wait in your rec room, then."

She took the younger femme's arm and led her off, using a very simple map of Iacon that Wheeljack had given them while leading them to the med bay last cycle.

Refit waved at the two cheerfully as she was led off, smiling happily as the silver mech waved back and the black and white Praxian inclined his helm to her with a twitch of his own sensory panels to them both. "What will we do for a half of a joor?"

"Recharge, hopefully." The XO chucked quietly at the ex-AI's huff of exasperation at her comment. "I'm sure you'll think of something, 'fit. Why not chat with the bots that wander in?"

"I could..." The younger femme blinked and started to look around with interest as the Autobot base came awake and more bots filled into the halls, either heading off to their own berths or on their way to whatever training or duty they had for the next shift.

The two femmes gathered a few interested looks from the bots that passed them, Shadowdancer in particular gaining some admiring stares as the rumors of her shoving Sentinel into a wall had received some time to circulate among the rank and file soldiers. The XO ignored the attention, having gained similar but more fearful looks when visiting UNSC bases as a human SPARTAN, but Refit shrank to the other femme's side as the two walked to the nearby rec room.

"Why are they staring?"

The taller femme slung her arm over the shoulder of the other.

"SPARTANs get stared at, frequently." She shrugged dismissively as she opened the rec room's doors and steered the other femme in. "It's a facet of our life that we generally tend to ignore."

Refit cast a glance over the Praxian's shoulder at the bots watching them as she walked into the rec room with her.

"Oh... I never knew that." She turned back to see who was already in the room and chirped a greeting to the bots she knew at the nearest corner table. "Good orn, Ratchet, Xenon!"

The two medical officers looked over at her greeting. Ratchet seemed just as happy as Shadowdancer was in being awake and thumped his helm down again with a short wave to them, but Xenon smiled at the bubbly femme from over his early cycle energon. "Good orn, Refit. What are you doing awake now? Most bots are still in recharge at this time of the cycle."

The yellow medic just raised a hand to cover his audio receptors with a groan, helm resting on the table next to his cube of low grade. He had spent most of the off-cycle reading the SPARTAN-Bots' new medical files over several cubes of high grade, and he had the painful hangover to prove it happened. He would have still been sprawled out over his desk deep in recharge if Xenon hadn't needed a spool of wire to repair some bot's snapped motor relay earlier.

Refit took a seat next to the older medic as Shadowdancer wandered off to the dispensers get them both a cube of energon. "I'm curious. I never saw any of the cities when we were still with the humans, and I wanted to see this one, even if it is really a mainly military base."

She beamed up to the tactician as the slightly taller femme came back, two cubes in hand.

"Shadow' said I needed a guide, though, so I don't get lost somewhere. Jazz had volunteered to show me around but he's busy right now, so we are waiting here for a joor until he's done."

"When did that fragger have the time to do that?" Ratchet pulled his frame up just enough to grab at his low grade, looking over at the two of them as he did so.

"When I backed up into him earlier." The former AI gave the two medics a sheepish smile before inspecting the cube of energon passed to her by the tired XO, who slumped into her chair much like the yellow medic did after taking a bracing draught of his cube. "These two are _not_ early cycle bots, are they?"

Xenon chuckled, but Shadowdancer responded in a way only Refit could understand. The growling and snarled strings of liquid sounds drew Ratchet's attention up, and Xenon's over, to the irritated Praxian.

Giggling, the tan and black femme leaned over to the older medic and translated. "It's a language from the humans, a race of organic sentients a galaxy over. It's called Russian. She just called us both annoying and told us to do something that I'm pretty sure is physically impossible with another organic based aerial creature known for getting up with the rising of their primary star."

The younger medic snorted back a laugh before he hurt himself. "I agree with her."

"Shadowdancer," the Autobots' CMO waited for the Praxian to look up at him before continuing, "who is first for maintenance this cycle?"

"The assassin, the infiltrator, and the tracker." Rubbing just below her optics, she only knew both were staring at her when Refit jammed her elbow joint into her side plates and the tactician looked up and caught sight of their wide optics aimed in her direction. She assumed it was the mention of an assassin that did it; they weren't really all that popular even back in the UNSC. "Um... Orpheus, Trickflip, and Holdout."

Ratchet blinked at her in shock before shaking his helm, trying hard to wake up enough to keep his processor on the current subject of discussion and not on how the world tilted at the action. "You have a fragging _assassin_?"

"He's an aft, irritates the Pit out of me." Shadowdancer flicked her door-wings at them, irritated at the subject of discussion. "But, he's got protocols that guide what he does, and any assassinations requires two superior officers agreeing that some... err... _thing_ needs to die in that manner. So unless you actually _hit_ him, you should be fine."

She leaned back far enough to stretch out her spinal support strut, sighing happily when a few joints cracked back into position. "

Holdout and I will be there for his check up as well, and Trick' is rather good with distracting him from being a processor grating _idiot_."

"Well, _frag_ , but an assassin? Just what in the _Pit_ have you all been doing?" Straightening up in his chair, the younger medic frowned with a dose of his own irritation at the SPARTAN when she appeared to think about what she wanted to say. "'jack keeps telling me to wait and that I won't like what I hear, but being told _something_ would be slagging nice."

Refit looked to the tactician, whose gold optics was regarding both medics' interested face plates calmly. "Very well. You wish to know? Fine, we just got out of two _galaxy spanning_ wars. Human against human in a conflict very much like your current situation, and then right into a war the placed human against a collection of alien races calling themselves the Covenant, who was trying to wipe out the humans over some religious matter or another."

The XO frowned thoughtfully as she looked around at the slowly filling up rec room.

"This, if we get as involved as I think we will, will be our third experience in warfare. The rest of the story is something you will have to wait for, until later this cycle, I think."

"As you think you will?" Xenon decided to ignore the potential of getting offlined by an irate and possibly annoying assassin and concentrate on the rest of it. After all, they tolerated Wheeljack and his peculiarities well enough; he could give them the benefit of doubt. "Dare I hope you will assist us in this civil war by lending out your well exercised knowledge of warfare?"

Refit and Ratchet stared at him in two different measures of surprise, but Shadowdancer just smirked slyly. "I knew there was a reason I like you. Yes, but to what degree will be decided later. Warcry already chose to _Waltz_ , but ultimately it's up to the rest of you if we continue with what we have planned already or if we do something else."

"Sounds good ta meh, femme." Jazz walked over to the table, smiling at Refit's excited trill and saluting the medics, having caught some of the tail end of their conversation. "Are we invited ta dis party 'o yurs?"

Prowl had followed the Special Operations lieutenant over to the table, looking a little lost as if something had happened that he had not thought possible, and frowned at the saboteur's back plates again with a measure of censure. " _Jazz,_ it is _not_ polite to invite yourself along to another bots' meeting."

"You both are, and it's fine Prowl." Shadowdancer smiled back calmly at the widely grinning femme. "Stay with some bot we know, and try not to ask too many questions. Be back to the _ATHENS_ before mid-cycle, I'm sure Jazz has other things he needs to deal with."

"Naw, not really."

The silver mech smirked back at his black and white shadow, who still looked like he had been involved in a hit and run by a bigger Cybertronian.

"Ah've got orders ta show Prowler around, now dat he's ah part of big bot Optimus' unit with meh, so showin 'fit around dis orn ain't ah problem." Tilting his visored helm, Jazz considered the Praxian femme for a moment. "We could keep her till yur ready for da rest 'o us, if'n ya want."

She hesitated, not really wanting the femme with little to no combat training out of any SPARTANs' sight, but finally nodded her agreement when Refit struck an apparently universally understood begging pose. It elected a laugh out of the medics, a small smile from Prowl, and a snicker from the saboteur.

"Very well. If you could also collect your officers, I'll comm Refit when the medical part of our visit is done, and we get Markmaker back. He's the second in command and last on the list for the medics."

"Some of you are still waiting on parts." Xenon got to his pedes as Ratchet downed the last of his low grade with a grunt. "You're soldiers will not be completely cleared from the medical bay until we replace the shattered structural support struts."

"Your suffering from that same slagging malfunction, remember." The yellow medic smirked at the annoyed twitch from the femme's door-wings, getting up to stand with his mentor with his empty cube in hand. "Or do you want me to yank on your arm again as a reminder?"

Shadowdancer frowned up at him irritably, casting a quick glare over to Jazz as he choked back a guffaw.

"I'm _fine,_ Ratchet.I'll see you both in a few breems." She got to her own pedes as the medics left and patted the slighter femme on the helm. "Keep out of trouble, and avoid Sentinel Prime please."

"Yo, Shadow? By officers, do ya mean ta include Sentinel too?" The saboteur rubbed the edge of his left audio horn as he asked. He had already heard most of the rumors regarding the little tiff between the two, and wondered who the Praxian wanted when she said 'officers'.

"I _suppose_ ," the femme frowned thoughtfully at the ceiling for a moment before continuing, "if you can't shake him. I would rather not deal with him, and I would appreciate it if you could keep Refit out of his sight, but if he wants to and can _ask_ you ..."

Jazz smirked wickedly as he caught on to the double speak. "Right cha are. Com'on 'fit. We'll start with da officer's barracks, cause Prowler needs ta at least see his new room. Den we'll go bother ol' Ironhide an Optimus after ah bit. Dey're usually where Sentinel ain't."

\V/

Xenon looked up from the tool cart he was cleaning a few breems after leaving the rec room when Shadowdancer and Wheeljack walked into the med bay with three other bots, two mechs and a femme.

The tactical Praxian waved to the older medic as Wheeljack all but towed the amused looking acidic green and black mech over to the repair berth he had worked on last cycle. The XO grabbed a hold of a dark green and flat black mech and held a low conversation while the last femme, painted bronze and black, wandered over to him with a small smile.

"Shadow's threatening Orp' so he'll behave himself, so it'll be a few moments before he gets over here." The femme, who the older medic assumed was another of the officers of the SPARTAN-Bots, gave him a quick smile as she hoisted herself up onto his berth. "I'm Holdout, tracking specialist and Supply Officer."

"Good orn to you then, Holdout."

Casting a quick look over to the two quietly arguing SPARTANs, he accepted the femme's data pad, from the collection that the XO had grabbed last cycle before leaving and had promised to hand them out to the rest of the soldiers on the _ATHENS_.

"How much trouble does Shadowdancer expect from... this Orp' mech?" Xenon blinked and tilted his helm to the side curiously, watching the dark green and black mech from the corner of his optics. "I don't think I ever caught his designation."

"Orpheus," the bronze and black femme smirked at his raised optic ridge, "yeah, it's not a Cybertronian word, and yes, there are a few stories behind it."

She smiled a bit more broadly when Xenon pinned her with an unimpressed look, not as amused by the teasing tone she adopted with him.

"And as you guessed, no, I can't tell you anything about it yet. But to answer your question, Shadow can beat the plating off him, even without me and Trick' here to back her up, so _misbehaving_ isn't really the issue. It's his attitude."

"I thought he was the assassin?"

"He is," Holdout shrugged dismissively at that fact and started to help the older medic with removing her armor plates, "but assassins specialize at sneaking up on a bot and killing them when they're not expecting it, either in recharge or some other distracting activity. Shadowdancer is more than just good in a fight, and Orpheus relies too much on his stealth capabilities and his assassination protocols. In a straight up fight between the two, I'd bet heavily on Shadow'."

"You're annoying, Hold'." Orpheus had finished his quiet argument with the XO and had wandered over to the berth between Trickflip and the bronze and black femme with a scowl. "And she wouldn't get away without at least a few major dents."

" _She_ would still kick your aft from here to Kalis." The Praxian glared irritably at the assassin's back. "And what is with mechs and calling me 'she'?"

" _You_ are intolerant. How's that?"

Shadowdancer smacked him upside the helm with a scowl of her own.

"Intolerant of those who act like-" the rest of it neither Xenon nor Wheeljack could make out, the older medic noted it was similar with the string of sounds the XO had muttered only a bare few breems ago.

Holdout snickered as the two glared flatly at each other. Trickflip, already half out of his armor, snatched up one of his acid green armor plates and chucked it at Orpheus' helm with a wicked smirk. "Quit being the idiot our dear XO accuses you of being."

Like the Praxian femme, Orpheus responded in a way only the other SPARTANs could puzzle out. He raised his right hand, most of the fingers curled up to his palm, with the middle most finger joint raised up before seating himself on the empty berth.

Stooping low to pick up the acid green plate, Shadowdancer straightened and handed the lone piece of metal off to Wheeljack before pointing her finger in the assassin's face plate. "Be nice, or stick with human behavioral patterns, I don't _care_ which."

Last warning given, she stalked off to a quiet corner to fuss with the data pad she had pulled out of her subspace pocket, nodding to Ratchet as the younger medic let himself into the med bay.

\V/

Warcry gave the two seekers stationed outside of the _ATHENS_ ' only conference room doorway a confused look before passing them by.

Inside the largest empty space on the ship, Spotter, Galeforce, and Knightblade were working on compiling all the data that the ship's library and the other SPARTANs possessed on humans, the Covenant, and every other bit they could scrape up about the human rebellion and the war against the Covenant. Standing just inside the doorway, as the CO didn't want to know how the two other seekers got themselves kicked out of the room vicariously by committing the same offense, the tank cleared his vocalizer to gain the three's attention. "How is it going?"

The silver seeker gave him a short, irritable glance from the display program he was working on. "Now that those two left pede trine mates of mine are banned from the room, better than we thought."

"On some things, anyways. On others?" The sniper threw up her hands in frustration, glaring at the display she and the close-quarters combat specialist had been using while trying to digitally map out a MJOLNIR mark VI armor suit. She gripped the back of her helm and slumped into a nearby chair. "Might as well be banging our helms against a brick wall."

Galeforce pulled a face at her for her disparaging comment.

"Well, considering there are bots on this ship that have had two completely different augmentation procedures done while human; there are about five or six different variations of MJOLNIR armor between all of us; neither of us really have been able to study either the complete physiology of the human body or the MJOLNIR armor systems before this; and we still have no idea about how we got twisted into Cybertronians in the first place; add to the pot that there are a few frame variants like Praxian and seeker; we may just have to allow the medics and Wheeljack at the dead SPARTANs that are _still_ in the hold if we want any answers," he frowned at his own screen for a moment, uneasy about what was going to happen later that orn, "if you and Shadowdancer still plan on telling these Autobots about our... _unusual_ circumstances."

"If we have to, we'll do that." Warcry rubbed the back of his helm as he considered the three. "Drop the armor map and concentrate on at least making this slag coherent for the Cybertronians."

He returned the salutes and backed out of the room cautiously. Turning around, he caught sight of Shadowdancer and Orpheus, apparently returning from the assassin's medical check, and waved the tactician over as the dark green and black mech made for the crew quarters to sulk, or whatever he did with his downtime.

"Where's 'fit? Didn't she leave with you?"

"She is with Jazz and Prowl, collecting our guests for the off-cycle and getting a tour of the base." She raised an optic ridge in confusion at the two seekers still standing outside of the door next to the tank. "You got tossed out?"

Drax had a look of mild irritation on his face plate with his arms crossed over his chest plates, but Tigerstripe was the one to answer the XO, shifting uneasily on his pedes. "Pretty much, Spot' said we were distracting them."

"Right... well, I need to steal Gale' and Knight' for a bit, and if either of you know where Nitro got to, let me know. They're next up for the medics to look over." Shadowdancer grimaced at the doorway, not really looking forward to the arguments both the green and gray mech and the bluish gray and black femme would start about how postponing their own trip to the med bay would be in every SPARTANs' best interest.

She cycled her vents as Warcry patted her on the back in relief of not having her task and got out of her way.

\V/

Refit paused, tilting her helm to the side as a faintly audible thud echoed from a hallway to her right. The two mechs she had been following got a few feet farther before realizing that she had stopped.

"Err... 'fit? What's up?"

Jazz retraced his steps until he was looking down the same hall. After a silent moment, he smirked as his audio receptors caught the sound that had snagged the femme's attention.

"Ah. Dat would be ol' Ironhide an Optimus." Throwing an arm over Refit's shoulders, he steered her down that hall. "Com'on, Prowler! Down dis way's da trainin halls."

"What are they doing?" To the two mechs, she sounded slightly worried.

Prowl answered for the silver saboteur, who was busy at a door control with something he had positioned his frame to block their view of. "More than likely, they are sparring. Jazz, is that allowed?"

The door opened before the saboteur could answer and all three could now watch as Ironhide flipped the younger Prime onto his back, causing another thud to sound. Refit tried to stifle her giggles, well aware that laughing at the misfortune of others was impolite. Jazz had no such compulsion, and hooted loud enough to gain the two larger mech's attention.

"If'n ya think it's so funny, Jazz, why don't ya take Prime's place?" The black bodyguard frowned at the three, annoyed with the interruption of his sparring time.

Optimus waved a hand from his position on the floor. "I think I need a break anyways, Ironhide."

He rolled to the side an up to his pedes just in time to catch sight of a tan and black blur pass in front of him.

Refit stood in the younger Prime's starting position, in an unfamiliar looking stance. "I've done these before, can I try?"

Before either Jazz or Prowl could speak up, neither wanted to know what Shadowdancer would do to them if the younger femme came back with even a scratch on her paint job, Ironhide smirked at the, compared to him, very tiny femme and lunged forward to tackle her.

Whirling out of the bodyguard's reach faster than he thought she could move, Refit snapped out a hand and caught the black arm and twisted herself around again, ending up behind a very startled Ironhide with one of his arms pinned behind him. Before the black mech could move to avoid it, she kicked out with her pede into his right knee joint and threw her weight forward. The bodyguard ended up face down on the floor, with the pilot all but sitting on his back and right arm, her left pede pinning his left hand to the floor.

Ironhide let out a bark of laughter as he conceded defeat. "Ya almost busted mah hydraulics there, femme. Who taught ya that?"

"Galeforce taught me most of it this last megacycle. He's a close-quarters combat specialist." With a giggle, Refit rolled off the mech so he could get up. "I learned the kicking and the pinning from Shadowdancer, who has the same problem of being a bit too light like me."

Prowl applauded the young femme as Jazz started to laugh again, this time at the Prime's bodyguard. "Nicely done, Refit."

"Didn't think ya would be able ta pin him." Spoken between his snickers, the silver saboteur helped the younger femme back to her pedes.

"Yes, well," Refit struck a haughty pose, arms crossed over her chest plates and helm tilted up, incurring another round of laughter, "I _am_ a SPARTAN. I may not have the experience or specialized skills, but I do have the frame for it."

"Sorry, yar highness," Still smirking, the silver mech gave the femme a mock bow, "we'll never underestimate ya again."

She beamed at him, before turning a sheepish smile to a still chuckling Optimus. "Sorry for interrupting. I heard something and Jazz snuck us down here before either of us could say no."

"That is fine." The younger Prime got up to his pedes, keeping an optic on his bodyguard. "I just hope you didn't damage anything that can't be repaired."

"Like some mech's ego?" The silver saboteur smirked at the angry rev Ironhide gave.

"Mah ego 's undamaged, younglin'. Ain't nothin wrong with bein' shown up by ah skilled femme." Ignoring the snickering that Jazz was still making at his expense, the bodyguard looked over to his charge. "An we may as well take ah break, if'n ya want, Prime."

"Ah! Right," Refit cast Ironhide a searching look, then shrugged an turned back to Optimus, "we are also collecting those that are invited to Warcry and Shadowdancer's report of just what we've been doing. If you're still interested in hearing that, most of the SPARTANs are all done with the medics and that means the meeting will be about two or three joors from now."

She bounced on her pedes for a moment, then nodded to something that the four mechs' couldn't hear or pick up with their comms.

"Warcry just said it would be okay if you want Ironhide to be present as well."

"Thank you, Refit." The younger Prime inclined his helm to her. "Where is this being held?"

"The _ATHENS_ ," she giggled at his lost look, "our... um, transport ship. The one you saw over the battlefield last cycle. We need to go collect two femmes named Zeta and Elita One, and two mechs by the name of Ultra Magnus and Ether as well... oh, and Ratchet and Xenon, if Markmaker and Wheeljack forget to collect them from the med bay after the 3IC is done with his checkup."

Optimus blinked as he looked over to his bodyguard, puzzled. Having that many of the higher ranking officers of the Autobot army outside of a well-fortified base at any one time was an unnerving idea, but the security of these strange bots was impeccable.

None of the Autobot patrols had located the transport, and quite a few of the bots sent out to scout around the city had deviated from their set routs in order to have a go at trying to locate the ship themselves. If what Wheeljack had said about his stay in the ship was accurate, fifteen Decepticons had also failed to locate the ship when it had been near Kalis. "...very well. May we join you in gathering the rest of those invited to hear this report?"

Refit blinked in surprise, and twisted to look at the two mechs she had been following. Still snickering, Jazz looked to Prowl, who frowned back to the silver mech for his rudeness. "I have no complaints."

The saboteur shrugged as he turned his visor to look at the femme. "None from meh, either."

"Okay then," turning back around, she smiled cheerfully up at the younger Prime and his bodyguard, "I don't mind either, so sure!"


	6. Chapter 6

Refit led the way out of Iacon after locating all of the Autobots that Shadowdancer had asked from her later that same cycle.

She was all but bouncing down the main bridge over the acid moat followed by the eight selected bots, chatting away happily to both Prowl and Jazz about what little she knew about the SPARTAN-Bots' varied pasts. Oddly enough, the pilot had easily admitted that she really didn't know that much about most of them and what little she did know about them had either been told to her by the soldiers in question or something she had read in their personnel files.

Besides being a little confused by the small fact the SPARTANs had their personnel files but not their frames' blueprints, most of the Autobots were content with following the femme to where the SPARTANs had hidden their ship. Right up until she stopped a good few hundred feet from one of the rocky mounds, still within plain view of Iacon's walls.

Opening his mouth components was as far as Ultra Magnus got in asking the femme why she had stopped. A faint humming noise that only Prowl, Jazz, and Ether had noticed on the approach increased until all of the Autobots could hear it. The view of the terrain shimmered with geometric blue fractures and rippled before plates of pure energy started to peel away before them, reveling the transport that so many of their delinquent scouts had tried and failed to locate.

Ether calmly reached up and shut the larger mech's mouth components with steady pressure to the underside of his jaw plate. "One would think you would have remembered this little fact about their ship from the battle not two cycles ago."

Magnus gave the Head of Special Ops an irritated rev of his engine for the crack taken at the expense of his observational skills before following Refit's helm long dash to a ramp that had been left open, presumably for her and the Autobots she had located. Jazz and Prowl followed after them, leading the rest of the Autobots into the strange ship.

The tan and black femme had halted not too far down the first hall, half leaning into one of the doorways and talking with some bot the Autobots couldn't see.

"Shadow' said they would start when every bot got here, and that does include you too, 'jack." Refit pulled herself back a bit, casting a glance down the hall and over the bots she had gathered together. "They're here now."

A good deal of muted grumbling answered her, and the green and white inventor finally shooed her out of the converted cargo room so he could leave himself. "I was just running some scans on that support strut fragment Ratch' gave me. Besides, I've already heard the beginning of your story; can't I sit out until you're done with that?"

"Nope," smirking at the exasperated look Wheeljack gave him, Jazz tilted his helm to include the group he was with, "where would be da fun 'n that?"

As the young femme smiled at the group again and started for the stair case for the upper level of the ship, the inventor gave the saboteur a dark pulse of orange light from his vocalizer fins. "You haven't heard this horror story yet, and it's something you can't call it _fun_ in any language."

"Horror story?" Elita One peered around her Commander's bulk to peer at the green and white mech in confusion. "It can't be that bad, 'jack. They're rather pleasant, and plus, they put up with you."

"I didn't say that _they_ were the horrible part of the story." Wheeljack grimaced as he remembered the bits of the SPARTANs' history he still had issues processing over. "It's more of what has been done to them that is what was so horrifying."

When the group caught up with their guide again, Refit was waiting for them next to a door with the Praxian Shadowdancer, the tank framed Warcry, and the saboteur Rook. The gray SPRATAN was skillfully leading the still chattering pilot away, nodding to the renewed talk about the slimmer femme's cycle spent in Iacon's Autobot base and what she did with the bots that had followed them there.

The blue and black Praxian quirked a small smile as she watched the two walk off, before turning her attention back to the Autobots.

Warcry gave the same apprehensive Autobots walking towards them a good long look, before mock frowning at Wheeljack. "You weren't supposed to tell them anything, now Drax might not win his little bet against Galeforce."

"I do believe gambling is still illegal, sir." Rubbing at the side of her helm as a few other issues between their new Cybertronian existence and their previous human lives came to the fore of her processors; the XO turned around and entered the only conference room on the _ATHENS_. "Just because we are far from home does not mean we drop the rules and regulations we are expected to uphold at all times."

The tank winced as he realized what he had said in the notoriously regulation picky femme's hearing.

"Damn, I was kinda hoping she would let that one slide. Right then," he waved the Autobots into the room after his 3IC with a wry grin, "after you."

Filing in after the Praxian femme the Autobots arranged themselves around the table, most nodding cordially to Xenon and Ratchet who were already seated. Shadowdancer stood next to one of their seekers, the smallest silver and white one of their trine, holding a low conversation about something displayed on a vid screen before them.

Warcry picked his way to one side of the room, having to twist, turn, and bend his large frame to awkward angles to keep from hitting anything or any bot inadvertently in the, for him and the larger mechs in the room, cramped space.

After a moment the Praxian femme joined him at the other side of the table from the Autobots, having finished whatever was needed at the seeker's station. The tank leaned back in his chair with a sly grin to the femme, content to let the tactician handle the meeting.

She pinned him with a short glare first for his little plan before turning back to the Autobots arranged on the other side of the conference room with a flat expression that did more to alarm the gathered bots than Wheeljack's warning.

"Since most of you know nothing about us, we'll start at the beginning. _Yes_ , Wheeljack," she glared at the inventor irritably before he could even draw himself up to ask, "you'll need to stay for this. We'll be going into more depth now than we did with you."

"Terrific." The green and white sank sadly down in his chair, gaining some concerned glances from his fellows as they looked between the femme they just met and the mech they knew.

Spotter waved a hand at the tactician, signaling that he was ready with the vids taken from both the _ATHENS_ ' library and the pics 'donated' by other SPARTANs, that would be used to illustrate the explanations.

"As many of you have most likely have figured out for yourselves, our story is not pleasant." Shadowdancer stoutly ignored the snicker from the other two SPARTANs mechs in the room and the inventor's own huff, "I ask that you hold all questions until the end; most will be answered by the story itself.

"About what we can calculate out to about sixty three and a bit more of a half of your vorns ago in the next galaxy over, a race of sentient organics called humans spread out over the solar systems closest to their original system, learning in the process that holding onto any uniform type of government over that much distance was harder than they thought. The military branch of the government, the United Nations Space Command or UNSC, started to fight on the frontier worlds of their systems trying to stop a rebellion from rising. They failed and in the process of gearing up to fight the splintered resistance to their government, the Division responsible for Covert Operations and scientific research called the Office of Naval Intelligence or ONI, thought up of the ORION project… a way to bioengineer super soldiers. They code named these projects as SPARTAN, after an ancient account of three hundred well trained soldiers that held a narrow stretch of land against an invading force rumored to have been ten thousand units strong, using their superior knowledge of warfare and their familiarity of the terrain against the attacking force. The Spartans were wiped out to the last, but the attackers were turned back."

Wheeljack had long since buried his helm on the table under his arms, trying to keep his processor on the ceramic mix Ratchet wanted him to replicate and not on the ancient history lesson the femme was giving out. The rest of the Autobots exchanged wary looks as they shifted around uneasily, none of them really liking the way this story looked to be going.

"The first attempt pretty much failed. The soldiers that were created were a bit better than their fellows, but there were too few of them to make much of a difference. A little over a vorn later they went back to the ORION project, this time assisted by a scientist by the name of Catherine Halsey. She warned ONI that she would need subjects about one stellar cycle in age for what was eventually codenamed the SPARTAN-II Project. Carefully screening possible candidates she picked out one hundred and fifty, and was approved seventy-five sparklings for her work."

Shadowdancer ignored the choked sound coming from Ratchet, as her gold optics were pinned on the table as she reeled the information off with some vids the others had donated being displayed, as this was about the first time any of the SPARTANs could or would recall willingly on their own.

"The strident and rigorous training regimen discarded the young humans' original names and labeled them with the numbers they had been assigned when being screened for the SPARTAN-II project. After reaching the age of about two stellar cycles, you would have compared us to younglings at that age, what would become known as the class two SPARTANs were put through a biological augmentation procedure; reinforcing the original carbon type calcium bone structure with carbide ceramics, certain motor system injections and reworking, some optical augmentation that none of us can remember anything about, and superconducting neural dendrites overlaid over the original nervous system. A number of the SPARTANs on this ship are from that project, like Warcry here and Spotter over at the console."

"Wait! You _did_ know what that chip was made from then!" Wheeljack's helm shot up in surprised affront, ignoring the uneasy tension from the other Autobots to glare at the Praxian femme.

She glared right back for the interruption. "Knightblade remembered that but I didn't, thank you very much. She also has the chemical formula if you would like to ask for it once we are done here."

Vocalizer fins flashing orange and pink in both slight embarrassment and his own anxiety, the inventor sank back into his chair. "Right, sorry."

"As I was saying," the femme straightened up in her own chair, trying not to look any of the bots in the optics as this part was more personal to her, "a grand total of thirty-three class two SPARTANs survived both the training and the augmentations. A few stellar cycles after that, a coalition of alien races calling themselves the Covenant got into a fight with the humans over some matter of their religious views. The Covenant wanted to wipe out the human race, which I think had little to do with their religion and more of what the humans were to an extinct race that was called the Forerunners. The Forerunners called the humans the Reclaimers, apparently something like a successor. This war waged back and forth for a while and in the meantime the humans' ONI organization decided that they needed more SPARTANs. They took Dr. Halsey's work and the training regimen and adapted it to kill less of its subjects and be far less expensive. They ended up with the SPARTAN class three Alpha Company, all of who were later killed in action in a battle for a planet the Covenant used as a forward supply base of operations. The same happened with the SPARTAN class three Beta Company although two survived out of that unit. Those two survivors trained the next few units, the SPARTAN class three Charlie and Gamma Companies. The rest of us are the last of the Gamma Company class three SPARTANs."

Shadowdancer's door-wings twitched, and she finally looked up to the silent Autobots. Most looked rather doubtful, except for the inventor and his friend, who was giving the green and white mech a long, searching look, having clued in to something not being entirely right with the story so far.

With a tired smirk at them all, she continued in the same level tone she had been using for the whole story.

"About a grand total of fifty eight vorns ago, the war between the humans and the Covenant finally reached one of the Forerunner's Installations, left behind to monitor a race of parasites that consumed any biological and intelligent life in its way. The Forerunners called it the Flood, and had fought it until they were almost wiped out of existence. In a desperate last act, the Forerunners gathered the DNA of all sentient life in a massive ship they called the ARK, and then triggered a bio-weapon designed to eliminate all intelligent life, which effectively killed them off and triggered the reseeding of the destroyed life by the ARK. This Flood parasite got loose again when the humans and the Covenant engaged in battle around and within something called the HALO Ring World, which had been left behind in order to ensure that the Flood never got loose again. The artificial intelligence in charge of the HALO Ring was called 343-Guilty Spark, who instructed one of the humans in the activation of the super weapon. Unfortunately, before the human, a SPARTAN class two by the roster number of Serria-one-one-seven who was also called the Master Chief and our superior officer, could learn about what he was doing from his AI assistant Cortana; the HALO weapon had already come online and was arming itself for its intended purpose. The Master Chief's AI managed to insert a delaying program into the Forerunner AI's programming to hold off then inevitable. Dr. Halsey, once she learned about what had occurred from SPARTAN-one-one-seven, became rather focused in saving the SPARTANs she had a hand in creating. She had never really come to terms with what she had done to us, even though we had been a necessity for both wars. However, once Refit, who had originally been the _UNSC ATHENS_ ' navigational AI, started to look for a suitable planet for the rest of us, she and the ship collided with something that I'm hoping you can tell us more about."

Shadowdancer nodded to Spotter, who pulled up the recording Refit had made almost five hundred human years, or nearly six vorns ago, of what the _ATHENS_ had hit in deep space between solar systems.

Prowl's processor finally gave out with crackle and pop of his logic circuits and the black and white Praxian slumped down face plate first onto the table, drawing a startled curse from the yellow medic as he leapt to his pedes and rushed over to the downed tactician. The rest of the Autobots were dead silent, no longer disbelieving at what was displayed for their optics.

On the vid screen before them was the jettisoned All-Spark, suspended in mid space. Carved with glyphs that even their oldest philosophers and scientists could not decrypt, it was and unmistakable object to them.

Jazz, for once, was not smirking at everything and was rubbing the underside of his jaw hinge, casting concerned glances over to the black and white mech the younger medic was working on every now and again. Silently arguing over a comm link, Ultra Magnus, Ether, and Zeta were trying to figure out how the All-Spark had changed the completely organic humans into the Cybertronians in front of them. Helm constantly moving, Elita looked from the vid of the All-Spark to the SPARTANs and back again, trying to figure out the same thing. Xenon and Optimus were trying to piece together the bots before them much like the other Autobot Officers, without the ensuing argument much like the femme with them.

Warcry gave the shell shocked Autobots a long moment to process that, then turned cheerfully to his XO. "I think they need a breem or two."

She raised an optic ridge at him for his demeanor, cast a glance to the bots across from them and took in their expressions, and then nodded in agreement and waved Spotter out of the room. "We'll give you five breems, and we'll be back with some energon. Sir?"

"We'll answer questions when we come back." The tank tapped the table a moment with one massive hand, before getting to his pedes with the blue and black Praxian and the two left the Autobots in the room.

"Well," frowning after them thoughtfully, Xenon compared what he knew now to what he knew about them before, "that does explain quite a few things about them. I was wondering why they seemed so… young."

"More like fragging immature." Ratchet carefully closed the back of Prowl's helm when the Praxian mech groaned in pain, his CPU had finally rebooted and was bringing the mech back online with what the medic figured was one _Pit_ of a processor ache. He could easily relate to it, given the one he had right at the moment. "They're old enough to know better, but not old enough to know why. Fragging Pit-spawns."

Like his mentor, the medic could now reason out some of the strange behavior of the bots that confused him before.

Gritting his dental plates, the black and white hoisted himself upright only to catch Jazz's somewhat worried look in his direction. "I am fine, Jazz. What did I miss?"

"Not much, dey decided we needed ah break." Only slightly reassured over the tactician's condition, the saboteur looked over to his superior officer. "Optimus, are ya alrigh'?"

The younger Prime had covered his optics with one hand and given up trying to figure out the SPARTANs on his own.

Wheeljack started snickering at them all from under his arms. "Told ya, didn't I?" The inventor pulled himself up into an upright sitting position to give his best friend an 'I told you so' smirk, but it seemed less triumphant than it should have been. "Now that you heard Shadow's little spiel, care to guess what she left out?"

"Left out? I don't think..." Ratchet paused in mid-sentence, reviewing what the blue and black Praxian had said to see if there was anything the femme could have glossed over.

Wheeljack waved a hand at him, pulling his attention away from his own processors. "Try not to lock up your pistons, Ratch'. It's a bit more obvious to me, since I heard this story before and the bits she left out. She skipped the augmentations the class threes went through and what they did, and I think I know why."

Zeta and Ether both frowned as they reviewed the content themselves. The Head of Tactical drew her optic ridges together when she found what the inventor was talking about. "True. She did, but why?"

"What she didn't tell you was that the class three SPARTAN were supposed to be something like readily disposable soldiers." Wheeljack set his helm back onto the table on his crossed arms, vocalizer fins pulsing a sickly green and violent orange as he filled in the blanks he was sure the Praxian XO would be irritated at him for doing. "The Alpha and Beta Companies were all killed, except for those two that trained up the Charlies and Gammas. When Shadowdancer was telling me this part of the story a few cycles ago, I realized from how she phrased it that the Alpha and Beta Companies were considered successes, even if they were almost completely lost to the last unit. She also stated that the companies were all but physically smashed against an overwhelming force of those 'Covenant' she was talking about."

Prowl's processor gave a faint pop as he cradled his aching helm in his hands, trying to sort the information fast and prevent another crash from occurring. "That... is _extremely_ disturbing."

"Yeah, ah agree with Prowler." Jazz's visor flashed as the mech sat back in his chair, tilting his helm from side to side thinking everything through. "But, dat don't explain da reason Shadow' left out da augments 'em class threes got."

Frowning, Zeta tapped her fingers on the table and spoke up before the inventor could respond to the saboteur. "Actually, it just might. Wheeljack, is there a _social_ difference between a class two and a class three SPARTAN?"

"Yep," with a half-sparked grin to the tactical officer who had caught on, the green and white mech reported to them what he knew from a megacycle of living and watching the bots in question, "it's not really obvious, but the class twos are more like general purpose models, with specialization and modifications unique to their job class. The class threes are... for the lack of a better word, built similarly, they just seem to be younger with a few more quirks and a lot rougher around the edges. The threes look up to the twos, like a newer model bot would look up to an older model. For example, Shadow's a class three and she has some major physiological issues, and War's a class two with a more stable personality. You can tell just from talking with them for less than a breem."

"Then it would be safe to speculate that Shadowdancer would not like to admit to Warcry that she and the other... 'class threes' were built to be disposable." Rubbing at her helm, Zeta's processor pulled up her ill-used Enforcer's programming and ran the data through it. "It would be like telling the first of your line 'I'm almost the same, except that I was only built to be used once and then forgotten'."

Wheeljack gave a tired snicker.

"And it would gather the same reaction I bet, just a bit more epic." The inventor waved a hand at the rest of the bots. "I think War' and the other class twos know, it's just not talked about in polite company, and that pretty much means it's been discussed never."

"Well, she's going to fragging discuss _this_ now." Ratchet scowled darkly at his friend who held up his hands in preemptive self-defense.

"She never got to it with me. We got as far as the seven dead SPARTANs in the hold and that I'm allowed to look at them, and then Prowl ran into the shields."

"Seven?" Xenon and Ratchet spoke out together and exchanged long, disturbed looks.

The older medic leaned forward and addressed the inventor on his own. " _Seven_ of them died from this?"

"Well, sort of. It's more along the lines that they were already too damaged to survive it." Wheeljack rubbed the bottom of his battle mask as he thought about what more he knew about the SPARTANs, which really wasn't much. "Refit said something to me about a roster done up by their Dr. Halsey, one that listed who was expected to survive and for how long. She also made the comment that the SPARTANs that died would have deactivated anyways almost immediately upon revival."

A few breems passed in silence, each bot in the room processing what they had been told and what they now wanted to know from which of the ex-human bots. By the time Warcry, Shadowdancer, and Rook made it back into the room, the two femmes balancing a tray with energon cubes, the Autobots had ordered themselves somewhat and were now waiting for their promised answers. The blue and black Praxian raised an optic ridge and fluttered her door-wings at Prowl as she passed out the cubes on her tray.

He frowned but twitched back an affirmative, causing the femme to smirk broadly. "Right... are you ready, or do you want more time?"

"We are ready." Optimus had already given up any pretense of understanding whatever had occurred to them, and pinned the femme with a confused stare. "To start, how did the All-Spark get enough raw materials to change you into what you are now?"

"I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I can guess." Handing her tray off to Rook, the SPARTAN-Bots' tactician sat back in her chair next to the CO. "Galeforce and Knightblade have their own theories, but from what I could understand your 'All-Spark' used our MJOLNIR armor systems to create these frames. It was an armored exo-suit that was only issued to SPARTANs, a self-contained and self-powered shell built for battle that protected our organic selves. From what Gale' can tell us we are what was once our armor, the armor plates had been re-purposed into our protoframes and some of the systems have been gutted, but our augmentations and a few of the features unique to certain variants still work, and the base systems are still operating just as they did back then."

Drumming her fingers on the table, she frowned as she tried to figure out the best speculation to share that the sniper had come up with.

"As far as Knight' can tell; the Cryo-Stasis Chambers that we had been held in for most of the journey have been fundamentally altered. Refit has told us about her supplemental programming being rerouted into our MJOLNIR armor's medical monitoring system, and the changes they worked on us while she was tracing the... 'All-Spark' back here. Knightblade also thinks that the liquid we had been suspended in helped, providing a far safer environment for the change than anything else could have been since the liquid had been made with the minerals and antiviral formulas needed by stasis locked humans already."

Ratchet frowned as he took that in, but hesitantly accepted that as an answer until he could look at the 'Cryo-Stasis Chambers' himself. "So, can you now explain that slagging blue tint to your protoframes, or do you still not know?"

"They think the blue tint is a reworked feature of the old armor." Warcry took up the explanation for his XO, figuring he had left far enough of it solely up to her. "A liquid metal crystal mix that reinforced the original armor plates, Gale' thinks it was hardened and used as the outer 'skin' of our protoframes and surprisingly enough, Knight' agrees with him."

"Wasn't like there was much else it could be," his tactician muttered as she glared at him, well aware what he was trying to do, "we have identified everything else, and that nanite goop that made up the medical system was _under_ our old armor."

"So, just ta recap, ya cyber-cats are all super soldiers. Changed by da All-Spark ta be Cybertronians, right?" Jazz had so far tuned out the rather scientific chatter, concentrating more on the new bots' history and what it meant for the long run. "But ya all got nearly constant experience 'n battle, trained for it since ya were sparklin's, augmented once ya hit yur younglin stage, an forced ta fight."

"Well, not _forced_. We knew what was going to happen to us." Warcry braced himself on the table, looking for all the world like a solider forced to report something he didn't really want to. "We were told at the beginning of our training what was going to happen and give plenty of opportunities to leave, but none of us took it. I don't know if it was either the knowledge that if we left we would be turning our backs to something that might just ultimately save our race or if none of us really believed that we would be let go that easily, but we all accepted it after a few attempts each to get away when the training got bad. In fact, trying to escape became more of a game to us, seeing how far we could go without being caught rather than an actual attempt to flee the trainers."

The silver saboteur pinned the Praxian femme with an expectant stare from behind his visor, and after a tense moment she grimaced with a dismissive flick of her door-wings. "It was the same for us. Even the Alpha and Beta Companies _volunteered_ for SPARTAN training. Admittedly they were the orphaned young of those killed in both the human Revolution and the Covenant War, but they still volunteered."

"The rest of our questions are for individual bots, so I only have one general question left." Optimus frowned from behind his battle mask, not really looking forward to ending this meeting from the Pit and trying to recharge after it was done. "What are your intentions now?"

Rook, who had claimed Spotter's seat since the tactician hadn't dismissed her after the cubes had been passed out, spoke up while the two officers exchanged considering looks. "Shadow's got us all assigned to a city, partly to keep us from ripping up any part of Iacon or our own ship in a brawl or two, and partly because having eighteen soldiers show up out of nowhere acting like we do would be a _bad thing_."

"Crude, Rook. But she is right." Shadowdancer's door-wings twitched in apology as she laced her fingers on the table before her. "As much as we would like to get to work on something similar to what we know and are used to, it would inevitably sprout rumors about how your faction is manufacturing purpose built war bots and supplying them with new sparks. That and I think we need some time to regain our stabilizers from this little... shock."

The tactician pulled a rather battered data pad out of her subspace pocket, and flipped through the files she had on it until she got to what she and the other officers had agreed upon last off-cycle. Sliding it over to the younger Prime, she continued for the others' benefit.

"We do have some experience in defending civilian populations, and I think we could extend that to include nearby cities. We'll seed the other SPARTANs in different cities, as well as establish and maintain a type of safety net in case of something like what happened to Kalis ever happens again."

The Autobots remained silent, looking either at the table or over to the Prime as he read over Shadowdancer's proposal. "Warcry, Galeforce, Drax, Tigerstripe, Spotter, and Refit would remain here?"

"They would be with the _ATHENS_ , yes, but where is up to them and you. The trine is hard to separate now for any reason, and Refit has a request to pose to your medics. Galeforce and Warcry would stay here, because this is still our base of operations until we can decide on another. War' is our Commander, and Gale' is volunteering for seeker sitting duties."

"You also left off yourself, Orpheus, and Trickflip." Passing the data pad off to a queasy looking Ultra Magnus, who had been fighting to prevent himself from following Prowl's set example and crashing during most of the meeting, Optimus Prime pinned the femme with a hard stare. "Why?"

She twitched her door-wings irritably once before explaining. "We're going to Polyhex and Gygax. I want some Intel on the Decepticons before we start to actively fight in this, and the only way to get it would be going there and physically living in the Decepticon held cities for a while."

Optimus raised an optic ridge at her as he carefully thought about what he had learned during the meeting, and not all of it was what she had informed them of.

It was just as he had speculated earlier after the comm call, they responded more to the air of command he used than to his actual rank compared to them. He wondered what category in their processors he fell into, and then decided after a moment that he didn't want to know.

They acted like subordinate soldiers presenting a proposed alteration of an established routine to a superior officer, and the younger Prime quickly figured that it was a combination of his own Prime status, their lack of their usual orders, and the slowly developing skill of dealing with difficult soldiers he was acquiring that allowed him some tentative control over them.

"Very well. I expect reports every few decacycles for the first vorn, as well as an actual meeting here after the first vorn has passed. Anything else will be discussed after you give me a written report on who is going where and what they intend to do to support themselves while you take this break."

"Yes sir." Shadowdancer accepted her data pad back from Magnus, subtlety flicking her door-wings in satisfaction as she reviewed who was available to get off the _ATHENS_ first.

Warcry had an odd look on his faceplate, almost as he was trying to process something that was foreign to him, but shrugged and mentally waved his odd thought off. "Well, now that _that_ is done. I'm going to hit my berth. Shadow', keep me informed on who leaves and who is waiting on something or another."

He gave the same unusual salute to the Prime and the other officers before leaving.

Rook smirked at the XO's obvious-to-another-SPARTAN satisfaction, before turning her smirk onto Jazz's empty cube. "Would you like to visit the rec room for another-"

"Yep!"

Faster than she thought possible, the silver saboteur was out of his seat and half way to the door before the SPARTANs' saboteur registered his movement, not having expected the abrupt action. Rook just cast a glance up to the ceiling before giving Wheeljack a half bow, who snickered before waving the two confused medical officers to follow him. Prowl trailed after them, still cradling his aching helm in one hand.

Zeta snorted at the younger bots, subtly ribbing Elita to get the femme moving on her own. After extracting a promise to explain the differences between Covert Ops and Special Ops from the SPARTANs' XO, Ether followed with a quiet Ultra Magnus tagging along behind him.

Optimus hesitated before leaving himself, looking back at Shadowdancer still fussing with what she had before her on the data pad. "How old are you?"

The Praxian femme blinked and looked up from her work. "Um... are you asking how old we were as humans, or how long we have been in existence?"

"How old you were as a human."

"Err..." Shadowdancer hesitated as she calculated it out. "I reached about... two and a half stellar cycles, I think. I'm not totally sure; I could be older by another stellar cycle or something. We lost track of time after a while."

"Ah... have a good off-cycle then, Shadowdancer." Optimus left the room before he could ask any other potentially spark scaring questions.

\V/

Prowl was the last Autobot to enter the _ATHENS_ ' converted rec room, nearly walking into Ratchet's back plates when the medic stalled in the doorway taking in the sparse decor. "What the _slag_?"

Jazz had dismissed his surroundings to look at later and had darted over to the rigged up energon dispenser in the corner, followed by the older medic and Wheeljack, Xenon because he figured they were as Spartan as their name for themselves and the inventor because he already knew. With the black and white Praxian peering over the younger medic's shoulder, Ratchet scowled at the rather cramped and dark space the SPARTANs called a recreation room.

Refit looked up from where she was playing some kind of game with a few of the other SPARTANs; Silentforce, Galeforce, Knightblade, and Nitro, as they were waiting for the Commanders' brief to be done. "Um... _what_ what?"

The bluish gray and black femme calmly set down two of the cards in her hand on the table. "I think he's asking about the decor, 'fit."

The sniper smirked over at her as the silent red and black mech dealt her two cards in exchange for the two she had discarded.

Flicking three of the cards at Silentforce, the tan and gray Praxian explained without ever once looking up from the ongoing game. "It was at one time our main engineering room. The generator back in the corner is also a fusion reactor, which powers the ship. When 'fit crashed into your 'All-Spark', the energy it gave off concentrated in one of two places, either in the reactor or in the Cryo-Stasis Chambers."

He picked up his three new cards and shuffled them around, twitching his door-wings while he looked at the other players from over his cards.

"The rest we can only guess at, so we couldn't tell you more than that, other than the energon produced is comparable to mid-grade energon." Tossing his whole hand down, Galeforce grimaced at the good natured teasing about his courage as he got up. "All of you can bite my now shiny metal aft. 'jack, I'll take you to see the dead frames next cycle."

The close-quarters combat specialist tapped the tan and black femme fondly on the helm at her grin to him before leaving the room.

Jazz wandered over to the table with his cube in hand, instantly curious about the strange game they were playing. Refit happily explained the rules of 'Texas Hold 'em poker' to him and why they were playing it as Wheeljack got the other Autobots new cubes of the _ATHENS_ ' produced mid-grade.

Knightblade showed her hand at the ex-AI's request; revealing three nines, a two of clubs, and a three of spades. Nitro snickered as he revealed his own hand; an eight of clubs, a nine of clubs, a ten of clubs, a Jack of clubs, and a Queen of clubs; causing some loud groans to sound from the assembled SPARTANs.

Silentforce just shook his helm and made a few gestures to Refit, who giggled and spoke up for the silent mech. "'force said that Nitro is a card shark, which would be some bot who either cheats at a game or is really good at it."

Refit exchanged places with Jazz as Ratchet took Galeforce's old seat. Silentforce raised an optic ridge at them, but shrugged and dealt out the next round anyways. The silver saboteur managed to win the round only because the pilot kept him from tossing away the pair of Kings he had started with.

Prowl watched the game with trepidation, accepting the cube of energon the inventor passed to him. "Is it a gambling game?"

"Pretty much, except we can play it without wagering anything so Shadowdancer doesn't toss the offenders through her office wall. She's got a bad habit of that." Nitro shuffled his next hand with another flick of his door-wings, casting a quick look to the ex-AI as he tossed two to Silentforce. "Why don't you go help Ratchet on this round, 'fit?"

"I'm doing just fine, thanks." The younger medic shot a glare to the demolitions specialist as Wheeljack set another cube in front of him before he discarded one card.

Knightblade shook her helm at the assembled bots, tossed two cards to the red and black mech, then waved Refit over to where she was sitting. "She can take my place, then. I'm due to leave the _ATHENS_ shortly with the first group of SPARTANs, and if Shadowdancer gets her way 'shortly' will be halfway through next cycle."

The sniper patted the 'younger' femme on the helm before making her way to the door.

"Don't stay up too late."

Refit giggled as she took up the sniper's cards and the two she exchanged before leaving. "We're down two, and got two to go."

"Ha, ha, very funny," Nitro gave the femme a sidelong look after a moment of checking his hand, "you're not counting Shadow' in that countdown?"

"I'm starting to believe that she never sleeps, or rather... recharges. I would be convinced of it if I haven't had the opportunity to wake her up from her recharge cycle once this cycle." The ex-AI gave him a bright grin back as she shuffled her cards again. "Quit stalling and show us what you got."

"Well, far be it for me to get in the way of what a femme wants." The demolitions specialist flipped his hand face up, revealing two pairs; a pair of threes and a pair of sixes, with a Jack in hearts high.

Refit laughed again as she showed the sniper's hand; three tens, a six of clubs and a three of diamonds.

Jazz shook his helm at his own poor hand before looking over to the younger medic, who smirked back and addressed the three SPARTAN type bots.

"I think I win." Ratchet had a royal flush in spades.

Silentforce threw up his hands in defeat and slumped back in his chair as the pilot burst into uncontrollable giggles. Nitro clapped a hand over his optics with a drawn out groan, door-wings fluttering in agitation. "I don't believe it. How in the _Pits_ did you get that hand?"

"Beginner's luck?" Refit tried between her sniggers.

The tan and gray Praxian pulled a face at her.

"Right, well. I know when I'm beat. I'm out." He got to his pedes and walked out the door, grumbling the entire way in counterpoint to his door-wings' twitching.

The red and black defensive strategist raised an optic ridge at the only femme still in the rec room, who gave him a pleading look back. Silentforce huffed a laugh out of his intakes before gathering the made from scratch playing cards up and setting them back on a shelf sticking out of the wall before leaving the room himself.

Ratchet regarded the femme who gave him a shy grin. "I wanted to ask you a few questions."

"I heard." Drumming his own left hand fingers on the worn table, the younger medic took a draught of the mid-grade as the other Autobots tried not to laugh.

Refit gave him a frustrated rev of her engine. "Wow, okay... that's mean. I want to know what's required of a Cybertronian medic. And... if either you or Xen' would mind teaching me."

"What? _Why_?" Ratchet pinned the femme with a hard glare. "Medical work isn't for the faint of sparked, 'fit. It's messy and mostly frustrating, and... uh..."

The yellow medic faltered as the discussion about these bots finally filtered through his processor and he realized just what it was he was talking to.

" _Yeah_... please remember that even if I wasn't a part of the wars the SPARTANs have been through, I do know the cost." The pilot glared back at the medic for once, not entirely happy with how he was treating her. "Yes, I am less socialized than the SPARTANs; and no, I'm not retarded in any way. I like being happy and talking to other living things, it's a _slagging_ sight better than being alone for _vorns on end_."

Xenon cut in before his oldest student could irritate the femme he had thought had been immune to the yellow medic's sarcasm. "You would need a medical upgrade, Refit. The scanners and the repair support systems are built into us. I do believe your SPARTAN augmented strength will suffice, so it would be mostly secondary upgrades to both your optics and sensors. But getting certified to be a Cybertronian medic takes vorns of work under a certified medic, after completing the medic's course at the Cybertronian Academy in Central City."

The ex-AI shrugged dismissively at the news. "We no longer have a medic, even if five-zero-zero survived he couldn't have done much for us, and I don't think Shadow' or the others would argue seeing as she let me ask this in the first place with full knowledge of what it would require."

Ratchet rubbed a hand over his face plate, really wanting the entire strange orn to be over. "Right... I'm sorry 'fit. I'll get started on the data work next cycle; you can come by and fill it out when you can."

Wheeljack's fins pulsed a light purple as he teased his best friend.

"I don't think I've ever heard her ever get angry before. Congrats, Ratch'! You can torque off every bot you meet!" The inventor dodged the half-sparked swing at his helm from the medic. "And on that note, I think it's time to hit my berth."

Snickering the green and white dashed for the door, one massively annoyed yellow medic a few steps behind him.

"Ya okay, 'fit?" Jazz inspected the odd look of the femme's face plate as he downed his last few drops.

"I'll be fine."

Refit blinked blankly after the two friends, then shook her helm at her thoughts as she got up as well.

"I think 'jack is right, though. I hope to see you all next cycle, but I need some recharge." The ex-AI rubbed the back of her helm as she headed for the door with a thoughtful expression. "Don't worry about the cargo ramp when you leave, Shadow' will close it."

Jazz would have followed to leave himself, as there was plenty to process from the information dump the SPARTANs dropped on them, but Prowl clamped a hand on the saboteur's arm, keeping him from leaving his chair. "Please inform me that my audios malfunctioned and Refit did not, in fact, say 'five-zero-zero' when referencing their deactivated medic."

"Unfortunately, I think your audios _are_ working correctly Prowl." Xenon reviewed the XO's rather condensed version of the SPARTANs' history and picked out what he had noticed possibly a bit too late to ask about. "Shadowdancer did say the training removed their original names and labeled them with their roster numbers."

"Ya mean ta tell meh dat dey had _numbers_ for names?" Shuddering hard enough to rattle his armor plates, Jazz scrubbed underneath his optics as he put that together. "Primus... an ta think dat dey went _along_ with it!"

"If you're curious, I'll tell you mine." Shadowdancer had at one point relocated herself to just outside of the rec room door, waiting for the last of the SPARTANs' guests to leave the _ATHENS_ so she could close the cargo bay ramp and activate the stealth systems for the off-cycle. "I'm also known as Gamma-three-four-one. Now, can you get moving so I can secure the ship? I would like to recharge this off-cycle as well."

Jazz hesitated when Prowl and Xenon made their way to the door, giving the SPARTANs' XO a long, considering look. "Ya know, femme? Ya never answered meh when ah asked ya if ya volunteered for yur SPARTAN duty."

The Praxian femme drew herself up and all but growled back, "I _said_ -"

"Dat da Alpha an Beta Companies did, yeah. Never said nothin bout Gamma, did ya? An yur ah Gamma."

Shadowdancer snapped her mouth components shut and stared the saboteur down. Xenon had reached the doorway and was close enough to keep Prowl from hitting the ground when his processor crashed again, unable to understand why the blue and black Praxian refused to place blame on the UNSC or ONI for her or the other's forced upgrades and excessive military training.

The Praxian femme and the saboteur remained silent for an entire breem; right up until she cracked a sly smile at the silver mech. "If you can guess my _original_ designation, I'll answer that question, and any others you develop, as honestly as I can."

Jazz raised an optic ridge over his visor as he considered Shadowdancer's offer. "An da catch?"

"Until then," the XO hadn't even bothered to misunderstand him, "stop asking questions you know we don't want to answer."

Humming a noncommittal noise in his vocalizer, the silver mech considered the possible consequences of such a request, and compared it to the possible benefits of having the Praxian answer him as honestly as she could. "M'kay den. See ya next cycle, Shadow'."

\V/

As Optimus Prime had figured, he had trouble calming both his systems and processors enough to engage his recharge's subprogram and as a result, his processor was lagging more than usual in the next cycle's early joors. This made his usual once per megacycle data work even more painful than normal to go through and deal with.

Carefully reading though the supply requests and base personnel transfers; just because he had the greatest shock of his entire function didn't mean the rest of Cybertron had stopped working or from Sentinel sending him more work; his audios caught the sound of his office door opening, but not the sound of another bot. Quickly snapping up his helm, Optimus caught sight of a blur of blue and black snaking under his rapidly deployed energon sword.

Shadowdancer had dropped into a split when she noticed the younger Prime's sword arcing for her helm. Now, she glared up at the larger mech from under his arm. "I have the report you wanted, Prime. If you could see it in your spark to let a poor femme up..."

Wordlessly, Optimus helped the SPARTAN-Bots' XO up to her pedes, all the while wondering: how did one apologize to a once-alien warrior femme that you nearly decapitated because you're still horrified and jumpy over their past and age? "You have my... apology, Shadowdancer. I did not mean to try to deactivate you."

"Well, it wasn't a _bad_ attempt." Spoken with a soft huff of her vents, it still took the younger Prime a moment to realize the Praxian was attempting to dismiss any need for an apology without actually saying so in an awkward way. After a moment, the SPARTAN femme pulled her battered data pad out of her subspace pocket and handed it over. "These are the SPARTANs that leaving, listed by roster number and designation regardless of if they are ready now or not, where they are heading, and what they intend to do when they get there."

_Immediate:_

_Refit: Central City. Will attend the Cybertron Academy for medic's training in two decacycles._

_015-Titan: Tyger Pax. Enlisted as an Enforcer, reports in two megacycles for training._

_083-Quickgrip: Yuss. Will attempt to obtain a position as a data courier._

_144-Orpheus: Polyhex. N/A_

_G193-Knightblade: Crystal City. Will attempt to obtain a position as a scientist's aid._

_G196-Trickflip: Polyhex/Gygax. N/A_

_G458-Holdout: Central City. Will attempt to obtain a position in the Autobot supply chain._

_G459-Markmaker: Vos. Enlisted as an Enforcer, reports in a megacycle for training._

_Waiting for Medical Clearance:_

_G027-Nitro: Simfur. Is currently obtaining the business license to open and operate a customization shop._

_062-Clearsight: Ankmoor. Will attempt to obtain a position as a data clerk._

_127-Rook: Praxus. Expressed intentions to teach a self-defense class._

_G337-Silentforce: Kaon. Has conveyed intentions to hire out as a bodyguard._

_G341-Shadowdancer: Gygax. N/A_

Shadowdancer watched Optimus settle back in his chair for a moment before frowning at him, mildly concerned by the Prime's unease with her in the office. "Are we really that much of a shock, or are you bothered by something else?"

The larger mech hesitated a moment before setting the Praxian's data pad down and meeting her odd gold optics squarely. "I am... concerned over your age."

"Two stellar cycles, give or take another for the class twos?" She tilted her helm to the side as Optimus simply raised a hand to his helm and covered his optics with a groan. "Did you know humans only lived for a little bit over a vorn? If they were lucky and didn't get infected with a virus or injured, _maybe_ two?"

Dropping his hand to tap out a nervous rhythm on his desk, the younger Prime found that he couldn't meet her optics anymore, given that he was slightly manipulating the bots' lack of orders or superiors for his own ends. "Cybertronian younglings are given at the very least three vorns to develop personality matrices and to choose a function class for their final upgrade."

"I-wow... okay. Three... _slaggit_."

The SPARTANs' XO shook her helm as she calculated the equivalent age out; she would be barely older than a sparkling to them. She took a seat on the chairs supplied for visitors and leaned forward with an erratic twitch of her door-wings.

"Uh... for simplicity's sake, think of us like... um... the pre-programmed bots from before you jettisoned the All-Spark into space. In all honesty, that would be the closest you could label us in Cybertronian terms." She held up a hand before he could protest her point. "Yeah, I know pre-programmed bots have issues, but so do we."

Optimus frowned and opened his mouth components to argue again, but Shadowdancer shook her helm at him with a wry smile.

"None of us would consent to spending one vorn, let alone _three_ , being treated like younglings simply for your, or any bots' really, peace of processor. Besides I think even you would have difficulty trying to find Guardians for eighteen warrior built bots, especially with the attitudes and features most of us have."

The larger mech shut his mouth components and examined the femme before him. In all honesty, if she hadn't told him just how young she was disregarding the time spent in stasis he would have never thought she was any younger than the fifty nine vorns she had put down in her medical record. Shadowdancer acted as mature as any of the Autobots' officers, even Zeta remarked that she was a well-adjusted femme even with her glitches after the meeting from the Pit last cycle. The SPARTAN-Bots could truthfully claim the time they had spent in stasis and add it to their age, rendering any argument he could come up with null and void.

"I think... to avoid any other issues that would be raised over your actual age, you and your bots should report the same number you set down for the medics."

"If it makes you feel better, sure." Sitting up straighter in her chair, Shadowdancer gave an acknowledging flick of her door-wings and nodded to the data pad. "As for why I'm here, dodging wild swings of swords and all, do you approve?"

The Prime cycled his vents in a sigh as his systems heated up in embarrassment over her quipped reminder of her greeting, reviewing the data again. "So the nine SPARTANs staying behind will remain in the _ATHENS_ until the last four leave. What do the bots left behind intend to do?"

"Our three seekers won't be doing anything other than their SPARTAN tasks. Spotter is going to work on our Intel, Tigerstripe and Drax are tagged to be the first to respond to any attacks. They will move the _ATHENS_ to a defend-able position and remain there." The Praxian pulled out two additional data pads, these much less battered and had the look of two pads supplied for enlisting soldiers in the Autobot ranks. "Warcry and Galeforce will join with your faction, War' as a frontline warrior, and Gale' as a combat engineer."

Optimus took the pads from her and looked them over. "In that case, I am tempted to list Warcry as a unit Commander, rather than a simple soldier. That way, the moment another SPARTAN returns he can have them report to him immediately instead of reshuffling the units around so you all are in the same one."

He was amused and a little unnerved to see that the individual personnel files from when they were human were included in the data pad's contents, locked under a security encryption obviously hacked from his own terminal at some point.

"And have the rest of us on... what? Unpaid leave or a hiatus of some type?" Shadowdancer frowned at her old battered data pad for a moment, toying with the cracked edges. "That... might not be a bad idea. Might raise a few optic ridges, but it would let us move about a bit more easily. The only point that worries me would be if some bot searches for Trick's, Orpheus', or my own designation or some name we occasionally mention and it pops up in the Autobot mainframe."

"That could be prevented by not entering in your designations until you feel the time is right to return and join with your fellow SPARTANs." The red and blue mech waited until the Praxian femme nodded in agreement before continuing. "Then Warcry will command the Autobots' SPARTAN unit, and in the meantime, he and Galeforce will be attached to my own unit until enough of you return to fill out the ranks a bit more for a proper unit."

Marking the appropriate files in his own computer terminal, the Prime made the changes to both the Iacon Autobot base's records and his own unit's personnel files.

"One last issue, before I leave." Delicately picking at the edge of her thigh armor, Shadowdancer fidgeted under Optimus' concerned gaze. "I'm not too sure about the infiltration team sending back even a data pad for reports. I was wondering if we could transmit the data we picked up to Spotter and have him make the reports for us. The uplink we have is difficult to trace, therefore more secure than trying to sneak out of places with a large number of soldiers. Not that I don't think we can do it, it just will attract less attention to ourselves."

The Prime frowned thoughtfully at her while he considered that alternative. Truthfully, no Autobot Special Ops had ever given reports while they were still in the field, and he had no idea how difficult actually giving a report could be for the SPARTANs going to the Decepticon held cities. The Praxian femme's suggestion was probably the best he could hope for in keeping an optic on the ex-alien bots.

"Very well, if you insist."

"Well, if we are done here, I have a number of bots to kick out on their lazy afts." Wearing a wicked smirk, Shadowdancer gave Optimus the salute he was starting to associate with SPARTANs as a whole and walked out of his office.

\V/

Refit peered around the door frame to the cargo room converted to hold twenty-five Cryo-Stasis Chambers. Ratchet, Xenon, Wheeljack, Galeforce, and Knightblade were pulling the dead and half twisted frames, forever suspended in several states between being Cybertronian and human, out of the Tanks and laying them out on the floor to see what condition they were in.

Luckily for the Autobots, the purple liquid seemed to have eaten away at the organic forms of the human SPARTANs, leaving behind just the metal and bones of the SPARTANs' nearly shattered MJLONIR armor systems.

It seemed like Galeforce's theory that the SPARTANs had frames that were reworked MJLONIR armor was valid after all. The seven dead frames looked like armor that had been hit by a high intensity sabot round to the SPARTANs, and it looked half melted and badly distorted to the Autobots.

Ratchet frowned thoughtfully as the sniper showed him the liquid metal crystal mix that originally reinforced the armor plates and was thought to be the reason the SPARTANs were blue by tilting one of the shattered plates and letting the sleek fluid sill contained within drip out. Vocalizer fins pulsing a yellowish green Wheeljack looked a bit queasy as Galeforce fished the augmented bone out of another SPARTAN's arm to show him how their struts originally looked. Xenon himself was also frowning, but at the damaged plates and joints, mentally mapping out what kind of damage it took to _almost_ kill a human SPARTAN.

Now knowing how these bots had come into existence, the visible results of the All-Spark's bid to save the SPARTANs confused, fascinated, and sickened the three Autobots by turns. Even as Cybertronians now, the SPARTAN-Bots still held the basic shape of their human origins. All of them had four fingers phalanges and a thumb on each hand, were limited to two arms and legs even if four arm assemblies or leg arrays wasn't uncommon to see on Cybertron, and had the same basic size and length proportion throughout their frames. The only changes were the additional frame variants; like the Praxians, the tanks, or the seekers, and the small fact the new bots had three toes total on each pede instead of the human norm of five.

Watching silently from where she was, the ex-AI almost jumped in fright when Shadowdancer placed a hand on her back. The Praxian femme gave a long look at the purple streaked floor before grimacing in disgust at the mess the five of them were making. "You're going to need a wash before you leave, Knight'.'"

The sniper cast the tactician a quick, dry look from the floor. She was sitting in the middle of a puddle of the purple liquid and the various blue tinted fluids that the MJLONIR armor was leaking all over her lap. "Sometimes getting dirty is half the fun, Shadow'. Wanna play?"

"No." Ignoring the snicker coming from both the sniper and the close-quarters combat specialist, the XO gave the two medics and the inventor a flick of her door-wings in greeting. "How's your work coming along?"

"I've got the method of making this ceramic now." Wheeljack gave the bone he was holding a doubtful look as he examined it from all angles. "Luckily for you, the All-Spark decided you didn't need the carbon based calcium structure to go along with it. I can make it up this cycle, pour it in casts, and have it ready to be installed next orn."

Galeforce snickered as he took the bone back to replace with the SPARTAN he had taken it out of.

"Be nice, 'jack. That didn't just support us, you know." His grin broadened at the uncertain look the inventor gave him. "The marrow inside of bones made our... I guess you could call it coolant."

Knightblade raised her optic ridge at him, and he made a face back at her, as they were still arguing over what did what compared to Cybertronians.

"Or energon, or oil. Really, it did a lot of things, even anti-viral defense."

"We called it blood. Smelled like copper for some reason, even though it was mostly made of iron." The sniper pushed herself up to her pedes, calmly scraping off most of the mess stuck to her as the XO snickered at her condition. " _Yes_ , carrier. I will take a spin through the wash racks before I leave."

Spoken in a falsetto tone, it caused the motley collection of bots to laugh.

Shaking her helm, the Praxian femme calmly walked off. Before she left audio range, she shouted back, "Go get a job!"


	7. Chapter 7

Despite Shadowdancer's threats of kicking them all out on their collective afts, none of the SPARTANs had any intention to leave Iacon just yet.

The orn after Xenon and Ratchet removed the dead 'bodies' of the seven SPARTANs that didn't survive the conversion to Cybertronians, Refit entered the med bay in time to hear Ether questioning Xenon about the reasoning behind the delay of the bots not waiting for medical clearance.

"Oh, that's easy." The former AI peered up at the Head of Special Ops from over the data pad the older medic had handed to her when she walked in. "Shadow' won't let them go without the proper Intel."

With a grimace at his own ignorance, Ether finally nodded slowly as he accepted that reasoning. "Makes sense. They know just about nothing of Cybertron, acquiring the information would be the first step in taking on a new assignment."

The smallest SPARTAN femme giggled at him, as he had missed the mark with his observation.

"Well, that too." At the confused looks she got from both mechs, Refit sighed and tried to explain another way. "It's more like... well... okay. First off, the individual SPARTANs are responsible for collecting the data on their city and their chosen profession. That would include maps of the city and surrounding territory, any well-known bots in said city than may be at risk for targeting by either faction or their associated supporters, a few preemptive plans for both defense and immediate escape, what their jobs would require of them beyond their own responsibility to the unit, any risks that they run in working the jobs, and so on."

When both Ether and Xenon nodded to show that they were following her explanation so far, she took a seat on one of the repair berths and continued brightly.

"Second, Shadowdancer has Spotter combing through our processors and rewriting some of our base programs, adding some blocks for certain features and actions, and working up a viable and secure communications relay so they can keep in contact even on the other side of the planet. Most of the new programs will prevent any... incidents from arising when our SPARTAN trained responses clash with the facets of civilian Cybertronian life."

Xenon nodded thoughtfully, but Ether frowned at her in confusion. "Blocks? You're going to restrict yourselves?"

"We have to. All of them are exceptional soldiers; well suited for extremely hostile situations where they need to fight for their very survival, but that won't work for civilian orn to orn life." Refit was now frowning herself, more so about the lag in reaction times both Galeforce and Knightblade predicted and the possible consequences for the safety and health of her SPARTANs. They were hers, after all. Dr. Halsey had entrusted them to her. "Anyways, once that is all set up and done, the SPARTANs have to run their collected data through Shadowdancer for approval, report here for a last system check, and then they can leave for their posts."

She now smiled up at them, noting the less confused expressions aimed in her direction, and turned her attention to her data pad.

Ether rocked back on his heel stabilizers as he processed what he had been told, looking over to Xenon in time to see the Autobots' CMO shake his helm as he returned to cleaning the tools left over from the SPARTANs' maintenance.

With a huff, the Head of Special Ops left the med bay, wondering just when Shadowdancer would have the time to explain to him the difference between 'covert' and 'special' ops if she was going to be doing all that.

\V/

The third room Rook tried in her idle search of Iacon paid off.

She had finally found Prowl, the mech was currently glaring irritably at Jazz as the silver mech tried to detour the Praxian from his work for a break. Barely containing an amused grin from breaking out on her faceplate, she chimed in with an argument of her own astroseconds after Jazz's latest failed attempt.

"Even Shadow' knows when to take a break, _'Prowler'_. I'm pretty sure no bot will thank you for crashing from low energy levels when you should be working."

Prowl cast her a glare that was as impersonal as it was frosty, and Rook had to bite her lip components to keep from laughing at him. "I am well aware of my limits, Rook. I have no need for a break at this time. And my designation is _Prowl_."

"Look, mech," Jazz got between the Praxian and the SPARTAN and set his hands on his hip joints, exasperated look painted on his face plate, "ah know dat, she knows dat, ya know dat. But, ya were ordered ta by Zeta, an ah'm here ta make sure ya do."

"Besides," the gray femme chipped in again with a sly grin at them both, "I have a few questions about Praxus, and have been told you are the mech to ask."

Visibly hesitating, the black and white tactician looked between the two radically differently trained but eerily similar saboteurs insisting on him taking a break before finally subspaceing his data pad and turning away from the vid screen he had been stationed at to review everything from the last battle and make up reports on what needed to be looked at and what seemed to be working for the Autobots.

"Very well, if you both are prepared to be insistent about this, I will take a brief break." He ignored the huff of exasperation from the silver mech and gave Rook a mildly inquiring look. "I will answer what questions I can, but it has been vorns since I have lived in Praxus."

"Fair enough. I need a map of the city and some common knowledge about it, not really anything about recent happenings that I can't get off the news vid channels." She smirked at Jazz's half annoyed glare pinned on the Praxian's back as she stepped out of the way for the two mechs to pass her and lead the way. Rook felt as if she would be missing something if she left now, and far be it for her to not be curious. That curiosity had kept her alive more times than she could count.

Silently, for Prowl was annoyed with being forced into taking a break and Jazz was annoyed that it took another bot to convince the tactician to take one, the three made their way to a nearby rec room.

As the silver saboteur left the two at a table for energon, Prowl gave the femme another blandly curious look as they both took a seat. "Forgive me for asking, but why not just download a map from the city's information server?"

"Cause, those maps always leave off the really interesting spots and well-known local... _gathering_ places." Rook smirked at the unsurprised expression of the other mech, and wondered silently just how Prowl had ended up as an Autobot. He had the mannerisms of a once sneaky bot, he even had the name of one, and she strongly suspected that at one time the Praxian hadn't been a strictly legal type of mech.

After a moment of quiet computation, Prowl gave her a small, wicked looking smirk of his own. "I can supply you with what you're asking for, but are you sure you want to know?"

"It's not really that obvious, but I spent my first decacycle of function in a slum of some backwater world as a street thief. It was the only way for me to survive until the SPARTAN-Projects snapped me up." The SPARTAN femme shrugged in a dismissive way as she leaned back in her chosen chair. "Nothing you all have tucked away under the city's base level will shock me after that. Besides, I need to know to steer away the really bad rift raff away, I'm going to open a type of dojo to teach self-defense as close to the slums as I think I can get away with."

The Praxian inclined his helm to her, to acknowledge the point. "In that case, can I bother you to deliver two messages for me?"

 _Old habits die hard_ , mused Rook as she nodded with a small smile. A favor for a favor was pretty much standard for ex-thieves and other unsavory sorts to trade services. "I can do that. Just leave me a name, I can figure the rest out myself."

"That is good, because I have nothing more than their designations." His small smile broadened as she chuckled in exasperated amusement.

"Quick question. Are you ever going to tell him you probably know more about being sneaky than he does?" It was a little rude, she knew that, but the question had been burning in her processor ever since the two had stepped into the _ATHENS_.

"Maybe." Prowl smoothed his face plate back to a neutral expression before Jazz returned with three cubes from the rec room's dispenser. "But as for your request, I will include the relevant information on a data pad and give it to Refit to deliver after my shift. Was that all you wanted from me, Rook?"

"Yep. Other than asking Jazz when Ether wanted Shadow' to drop by and answer his questions."

\V/

Taking the proffered data pad, Shadowdancer frowned at the silent mech who was the defensive specialist of the surviving SPARTANs. "I still don't like it."

{ _Like it or not, that's where I'm going. A few demonstrations by the Decepticon minority shouldn't prevent me from working; in fact, it should make a bodyguard of my caliber more sought after._ } Silentforce shrugged as if to say what else could he do about it as she started to scowl at him rather than the information displayed. { _It's not like I can't take care of myself, ma'am._ }

"True, and we _need_ a bot in Kaon." She huffed irritably out of her intakes, still feeling a little off about sending the SPARTAN to the almost contested city.

Despite the firmly ruling Autobot inclined City Council, the citizens were leaning more towards Decepticon in mentality; and the friction between the government and the masses was rising minutely every orn. Silentforce had talked to Zeta about her city of origin, and the Head of Tactical had imparted the not so widely known information about the unrest in Kaon that she had seen well before she became an Enforcer Station Chief.

A few joors at a computer terminal searching for additional information had colored a rather violent picture for the SPARTANs. As it stood, the city was still officially an Autobot city, but it had experienced more violence and riots than any of the other cities did due to high Decepticon activity there.

Making the city of Kaon the next possible territory to follow either Polyhex's or Gygax's example.

"Well, if it happens, it happens." The XO gritted her dental plates as she reviewed the relevant files on the defensive specialist's target location and projected job. "You'll just have to think on your pedes if this does happen. I really, _really_ , don't like sending you off to such a situation, but we can't spare Trick' for it at the moment."

The metallic red and black mech nodded as he took his data pad back. { _I'm sure I'll be fine. If worse comes to worst, I'll retreat and we will have a hole in the communications net between you and one-four-four and the rest of us. Best case, I'll be there until you and the assassin are set up safely and can spare one-nine-six for another city._ }

"Yes well, you now have standing orders to retreat at the first sign of a Decepticon takeover." Shadowdancer jabbed her finger at his optics when a blip of static over the comms betrayed the stoic mech's surprise. "No arguments. This is probably the most risky assignment so far, besides my own and some of the other Covert Ops. You have the same orders as we do. Get out at the first sign of trouble you can't handle on your own."

{ _Yes, ma'am._ } Silentforce shook his helm at her worry as he left, plotting out the best course of action for his arrival in the city.

Drumming her fingers on her desk, Shadowdancer glowered at the Trickflip shaped hole in her office wall. Speaking of infiltrators... "Are you going to stop sulking and talk to me, or should I continue to ignore you?"

She got a pair of orange optics glaring back at her in response. Trickflip was tasked with repairing the hole she made with his frame by kicking him violently though her office wall and the mech had a clear view into her office from where he was in the hallway. "We need a brig, or something, so War' can throw you in it when you get moody."

"You rearranged my files without permission, you shouldn't be surprised it ticked me off." She smirked wickedly at the irritated expression on the mech's faceplate. "How long have we known each other?"

"Uh..." Neatly sidetracked, the acid green and black mech blinked blankly at her. "I was a part of your training squad back on Onyx, when we were 'selected' for the SPARTAN-Program."

Shadowdancer nodded in mock approval, faceplate smoothed from showing any expression. "How many times have I caused you physical harm because you did _something_ that set off both my glitches?"

Trickflip gave a rude sound, one more of a growl of his engine than an actually spoken curse. "More times than I care to remember."

" _Why_ did you think you could get away with it now?" Tone laced with false sweetness, the XO gave the now trapped mech a wicked smirk. "What were you looking for?"

"S _laggit_... you're even worse than you were back on Onyx." Trickflip gave the sheet of metal next to the hole a long look, wondering if postponing the conversation would help or hinder him. With a shrug, the mech abandoned his work in order to enter the XO's office and talk to her without the wall in the way. "I know you. You probably have dossiers on just about every bot we've met so far. How you can best use them, and what you think of their methods, how likely they are to act in a way harmful to your goals, and so forth. I was wondering if you have a file on all of us."

"Well, stated like that it sounds a bit creepy." Shadowdancer pinned the other covert ops mech with a bored look. "Yes, I have files on all of you. You've even seen them. They are a part of your ONI conducted psychological assessments, and you can read them for yourselves."

Blinking, the infiltrator sat down hard in the chair across from her, nearly stalling in shock. "That was you?"

"Me, or some other tactician, someone that had psychological training that worked with you, or a superior officer who's unit you were attached to." She agreed mildly, trying hard not to laugh at the other mech's obvious surprise. "The part that goes over how likely you are to obey orders in stressful situations? Any to be expected deviations from set plans, like Tigerstripe leaving an engagement to rescue some orphans? That type of slag? All of it is either from ONI investigating your past actions in the field or reports from those like me."

Giving up, Shadowdancer started laughing loudly at the mech's shock.

"Really, Trick'. How did you think they got all that?"

"I always assumed some type of freaky voodoo they pulled off during our augmentations." Trickflip shook his helm in disgust at his own thick processor. "Figures. But... if not in defense of your Top Secret files, why kick me through the wall?"

The XO smiled at him, and there was a hint of apology in it as well as irritation. "Because I spent the last two joors arranging those files, and you screwed up my system in a breem."

" _Perfect_... well, now that you're a little less moody, can I take a look at my file?"

"Fine, just don't screw it up now, and get the wall fixed." Standing up, Shadowdancer patted the mech on the back as she left the tiny office. "I have to go see Ether about some concerns of his, so I'll be back in a few joors."

Silently musing on the difficulties in having a secret on a ship as small as the _ATHENS_ , the XO wondered who had told the infiltrator about that part of their files. It wasn't common knowledge, not even to Warcry, and she was the one that had to tell the CO about that part.

\V/

Peering into a half full clear container, Wheeljack added a bonding agent to the mixture and Knightblade got the last step in making the ceramic support struts ready.

She and Galeforce had already carved out molds for the ceramic mix in the shapes needed to replicate the SPARTAN's busted or shattered support struts, and the two SPARTANs were carefully laying them out in the newly cleaned cargo bay that had once held the SPARTANs for nearly sixty vorns.

Every time the inventor entered the room he had to shudder at the thought of Refit being alone for what _had_ to feel like nearly endless vorns as she steered the _ATHENS_ , not to mention that the only beings she could have talked to were stasis locked until she could find a planet to land on so she must of have been incredibly lonely.

The sniper smacked the back of her hand against his shin plate, knocking the green and white mech out of his wandering processor and back to the moment. "Don't let it boil, 'jack. Or we'll have to do this again."

"I remember, Knight'." Easing the first container of the ceramic mix off the heat source, Wheeljack carefully carried it over to where she was crouched over the molds to replace the XO's broken to bits left shoulder assembly. Knightblade twisted herself so she would not be in the way, deftly bending herself back so the inventor would have room to work without her in the way.

Galeforce started up on the next batch as the first was poured into its' mold. "You know, it's probably a good thing there isn't much that can damage this slag."

"That was why it was chosen for our augmentation in the first place." Knightblade only moved when Wheeljack finished pouring the mix, gingerly straightening up to her full height and flexing out her spinal support struts as she did so. "Imagine where we would be without it."

"Those 'bone' things wouldn't have helped you at all here." Vocalizer fins flashing a dull green and blue, he was sort of getting used to the SPARTANs and their odd ways of discussing things by now, the inventor set the empty container on a rack to be cleaned out and reused. "I wonder though... can this carbide ceramic recipe be improved?"

Both SPARTANs shared a long look, before smirking at the predicable response from the inventor.

"Like how?" As the SPARTANs' engineer, Galeforce figured he had to at least ensure that the mech didn't try anything that would torque Ratchet off until the green and white bot left for Crystal City.

Knightblade rubbed the area below her optics before concentrating on mixing up the bonding solution for the next ceramic batch. Despite what the SPARTAN mech thought, she was sure Wheeljack would wait until he got back to his own labs before trying anything excessive. Which meant she would have to be on the lookout when he finally got around to returning to Crystal City.

"Like if we used something else instead of the carbide. Maybe there's something on Cybertron that your scientist didn't have, and therefore couldn't try." The inventor stroked along the bottom of his battle mask as he thought it out. "There are at least three elements that could serve as a substitute; they have the same chemical reactions as carbide . . ."

The close-quarters combat specialist clapped the slighter mech on the back as he shook his helm in fond exasperation. "Let's concentrate on this first, then we can work on improving it."

\V/

"...say that again?" Warcry looked up from his cube of mid-grade energon in some surprise.

"There is a mandatory orientation for all new bots in the Autobot ranks." Ultra Magnus was trying, and failing, not to smirk broadly at the other Commander's suddenly wary look.

The SPARTAN-Bots' Commanding Officer gave the Commander of the Elite Guard an unimpressed look back. "Orientation?"

The two were in the _ATHENS_ ' rec room, taking a break from running herd on their different units. So far, Magnus had to stop three different fights from breaking out in his own ranks, but Warcry was winning the 'worst behaved unit' award with his XO kicking soldiers through walls.

"I could teach an 'orientation to warfare', but if you want me to take a group of bots that don't know one end of a rifle from the other and teach them to use it correctly, I'm calling in Shadow' to help 'teach'."

Ultra Magnus just laughed at how the tank had taken his comment. "You're not teaching."

Warcry hesitated, torn between wanting to know what was so funny and wanting to find his XO anyways, just in case.

"You and Galeforce are _taking_ the class. It's for all new Autobots to Iacon, whether or not they have prior combat experience in the military."

"You're _joking_." The tank screwed up his faceplate in an expression of mock horror. "That's like... cruel and unusual punishment."

Warcry thought about how well that would go over with the rest of the SPARTANs, and started laughing loudly himself.

"I _dare_ you to inform my soldiers of that. You think Shadow' kicking Trick' though a wall was bad, just wait until either Orpheus or Quickgrip hear of this."

\V/

Kicking at a random rock in her way, Clearsight scanned the surrounding area carefully before turning back to the other femme. "Here?"

Holdout looked around once before nodding back.

"Sure. Okay, this is what Shadowdancer asked me to look into, but I think you're a bit better suited in actually finding if this is true." The tracker handed over a data pad to the scout.

Thinning her lip plates into a straight line, the red and black femme read over the data while wondering what was up with the cloak-and-dagger approach in handing off the information. Right up until she started to comprehend what she was reading. "What the _frag!_ "

"Yeah, that's what I said when she presented it to me. If it's true..." The bronze and black femme stared at the ground hard as the scout read over the theory again. "Well, it wouldn't be pretty. Shadow' asked if I could look into it, since she will be in the middle of the Decepticon held part of Cybertron. I can't see any reason for a supply bot to be asking these kind of questions, but I'm sure you and Knight' could ask without raising any suspicions."

Clearsight grimaced at the Supply Officer as she took in the suggestion the XO wanted looked at. "I'm not really sure about this, but I will look into it."

"That's all we are really asking." Holdout clapped the scout on the back in apology before turning around to head back to the _ATHENS_.

\V/

Leaning back in his chair, and very thankful he had ripped off the arms of it before sitting down to make room for his wing plates, Drax scowled up at the ceiling. "I'm bored."

Spotter spared his trine leader a quick, exasperated look from his current work. "Do you want to swap places with 'stripes? I'm sure he wouldn't mind."

"I _really_ wouldn't mind." The largest seeker of the SPARTAN trine was sitting in the middle of the bridge's floor, a few wires trailing from under his helm to the computer terminal the hacker slash recon scout was working from. "Really. This kinda tickles."

"Tickles? You have some bot in your processor, and all you can say is that it tickles?" Drax tilted his chair upright again, his pedes hitting the ground with a thud as he glowered at the bots he was 'stuck' with as trine mates. "You both are _strange_."

Spotter shrugged idly as he picked out more keys on the terminal, struggling to maintain his processors' link with the computers and at the same time keep up a conversation with his trine leader. "We are your trine, what does our strangeness say about you?"

"That this is one of the universe's more unfair dispensations." The dark blue and black seeker frowned irritably at his lighter painted trine mates.

"Well, think of it this way," the recon scout finally finished the programming extras the XO had requested and sent the data over the comm lines before turning to the surly seeker, "you could have gotten Nitro, Clearsight, or even Orpheus as trine mates instead of us. Who would you rather have?"

Drax remained silent as he and the other two seekers downloaded the new behavioral guidance programs and installed them to control the more violent impulses the soldiers had from more time on a field of battle than any of them ever wanted in the first place.

True, he could have gotten worse for his trine, but then again, who said they needed a fragging trine in the first place? "Are we done?"

"YES! We're done." Spotter helped Tigerstripe unhook himself from the computers. "Now, what do you want to do?"

"...I really don't know."

\V/

Knightblade and Silentforce were the first two SPARTAN-Bots to leave Iacon, one by the regular methods and the other by irregular ones.

The still silent mech had all but snuck out of the _ATHENS_ and had disappeared into the territory of Iacon before most bots even got up for the cycle, mostly to avoid Ratchet's eventual blowup about leaving with a malfunctioning vocalizer. The sniper had to endure the brunt of the yellow medic's wrath, when she went in for her own last checkup to clear the med bay.

Warily watching the Head Medic of Iacon curse out glitching bots and those who lived with them from the other side of the med bay she leaned over to a mildly amused Xenon, who was ensuring that all her repairs were integrating as they were supposed to in her leg assemblies. "Does this happen a lot? I mean, I really don't care if he swears the sky deep blue, but if we are leaving Refit to him, the cursing she would pick up will be a bit... unnerving at first."

The Autobots' CMO suppressed the desire to laugh at her mock concerned comment.

Somehow, Ratchet had become a type of 'bot to not annoy for any reason' to the SPARTANs, and it amused him to no end to watch most of the highly trained, on occasion violent, soldier types tiptoe around the younger medic when he was even mildly irritated or annoyed about something. He knew it had more to do with how Ratchet had handled their Praxian XO right after the battle; the femme herself was more than just formidable to deal with even to her own soldiers and having those same soldiers watch as the medic yelled at her without any consequence had given the younger mech a decent amount of pull with them.

"Only when a bot does not ensure they are in working order before checking themselves out of the med bay he is responsible for."

"Right... well," the SPARTAN femme flexed her left leg as the older medic finished his check on her repairs and replaced her shin armor, "this was my last stop. I'll be leaving for Crystal City before the cycle is out. Uh... Ratchet?"

" _What_." The yellow medic turned the full force of his glare at her, making the sniper take a few steps back in self-defense.

Raising her hands in a mock show of surrender, she bravely pressed on anyways. "Shadowdancer has me assigned to Crystal City, I was wondering if you wanted me to check up on Wheeljack when he finally gets back there."

Ratchet paused as he considered that offer. It was probably a peace offering on their behalf, a sort of apology about the defensive specialist's actions earlier that cycle. " _Fragging_... fine. Once or twice a decacycle, if you could."

Still with her hands in the air, the sniper nodded as she backed out of the med bay slowly, as if she thought he would start throwing his tools at her. The yellow medic hefted a wrench at the femme's helm in response, and she bolted out of the room with a snicker. "Slagging Pit-spawns."

Xenon gave up trying not to and laughed loudly as Ratchet huffed at him.

Even if the SPARTANs were wary of the younger medic's temper, the best thing about it to the older medic was that they still teased the younger mech about it. This made the SPARTANs the favorite patients of the CMO. If they could recognize the angry front that Ratchet put up was just that, they were fine by him.

\V/

Shadowdancer checked to ensure that both Orpheus and Trickflip were ready for what was about to happen, and then calmly cycled open the door to the extra berth room they had used as a temporary prison, her face plate resembling an expressionless mask.

The one-legged Decepticon mech inside flailed around to see who had finally arrived to deal with him, and only the bindings keeping his mouth components shut kept him from shrieking in sheer terror at the sight of the femme who had cruelly ripped out his vocalizer wires. He had been in the same room for the last three orns, only occasionally visited by a silent red and black mech who would pour a ration of energon down his intakes then leave, and only once by a grayish blue and black femme who had painfully soldered his ripped vocalizer wires back in.

The electric blue and black Praxian femme took a step into the room as the door slid closed behind her, shutting out the sight of two other mechs who were guarding the door from any interruptions. "You've been all but forgotten by just about every bot. I'm sure we could keep you for a few more cycles, but the Autobots will eventually remember we have you and ask us to relocate you to their brig. In what... _condition_ you leave us in is all up to you."

Her purring vocalizer belied her cruel claws as she ripped the bindings off his mouth components in one sharp movement.

"W-what-t d-do you-u want-t from-om me?" He shrank back against the berth they tossed him on as the femme sat next to him, flexing her claws as she drew them up the side of the bare metal frame of the odd berth with a soft squeal of shredding metal.

"Information, what _else_ could you be good for, hmm?"

Two joors later Shadowdancer calmly left the room, flicking a few stray drops of energon off her new claws. "I've got what little he had. Trick', make the arrangements to transfer him before the Autobots remember; Orpheus, find me Spotter to... modify his memory files a little. Once we're done here, meet me in my office for the information about both Polyhex and Gygax."

The XO flicked her door-wings in a dismissal, still admiring her new features.

It had taken a bit of work, but convincing Wheeljack to make them up for her had paid off.

\V/

As more and more of the SPARTANs filtered through the med by for their final checkup and disappeared from the every cycle routines they had kept; it was noticeable when Rook finally stopped laughing every time Jazz would argue about something to Prowl and very noticeable when Shadowdancer stopped randomly scaring the bots on the way to their shifts; the rest of Iacon finally clued into the small little matter of that most of their totally unexpected saviors were leaving in groups of ones and twos.

They were only partially reassure when Galeforce and Warcry attended the orientation class for new bots to Iacon's Autobot base, and when it looked like the youngest of the femmes along with them had seemed content to stay for a little while longer.

They definitely noticed when the _ATHENS_ left the barren planes before Iacon, the transport was anything but quiet that close to the city starting from a cold stop, and the three strange seekers that actually walked instead of using the hopping gait usual to their build became less seen around the city.

Warcry would just laugh when bots would express concern over the apparent dismantling of an obviously competent military unit that worked well together, and Galeforce just pinned the same bots with exasperated stares until they stopped talking to him, unnerved.

The SPARTAN-Bots had been a part of Iacon's population less than a megacycle, and had disrupted routines and the occasional unfortunate bot during their stay. It took another few megacycles before Iacon fell back into the usual patterns they had kept before their unanticipated arrival.

\V/

Knightblade was relieved when the terrain around the highway she was on changed to the crystal studded expanses that marked the beginning of Crystal City's territory.

With what Wheeljack had told her, it meant she was a few joors away from the city proper and the sniper was really looking forward to getting off her aching wheels and finding a 'lodge', some sort of Cybertron inn, to rent a room for a megacycle.

The Autobots had been kind enough to supply the SPARTANs with enough credits to see them through the first few cycles in their respective cities, and when they had been near Kalis some of the SPARTAN scouting around had searched through the rubble and found small catches of credits apparently abandoned when the city was attacked. Holdout had taken them and split it all up according to the financial needs of the SPARTANs, exempting the CO, Galeforce, Refit, and the trine from her calculations.

Mildly wondering if she could conserve her credits out even further, switching from a sniper trained soldier to a scientist's assistant would be a bit of a stretch even for her, Knightblade almost missed the nearly concealed tracks of five Cybertronians dragging a sixth across the road. Sheer curiosity made her slow, tracking the drag marks and paint transfers across the highway and off to the side of the road.

Idling in her alt mode in the middle of her lane of traffic, Knightblade weighed the possible consequences of interfering with whatever was going on to her sore systems and the lag that had made itself known when the non-Decepticon cities stationed SPARTANs had downloaded the behavioral modifications needed for civilian life.

With an irritated rev, thinking ' _this had better be worth it'_ the entire time, the sniper pulled off the highway and transformed to her bipedal form, carefully activating her stealth systems to sneak up on whatever was going on. Picking her way across the leftover rubble from when the crystal towers had been crafted centivorns ago, she used the rocky lumps to help conceal the ripples her systems made in what was supposed to be empty space and peered around a hefty chunk of rock to see what was going on.

Five bots, one looked like it could be a femme but Knightblade couldn't be sure from how far away she was, were standing around a sixth, a mech who was bound and looked not too happy with what was going on. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen, and the sniper carefully pulled her Convent sniper rifle out of her subspace pocket and aimed carefully as she too waited for what was supposed to happen.

A seventh mech walked up, from the opposite side of where she was hidden, and addressed the group while ignoring the frustrated struggles from the mech on the ground. "Shockwave gave the order to deactivate him, why is he still functioning?"

"What are we going to do with his Autobot loving frame?" The femme; and Knightblade could tell she was a femme by both her vocalizer modulation and when she shifted so the dim light highlighted the angles to her frame, kicked at the mech laying on the ground. "I vote we display it, somewhere nice and public, for every bot to see."

Mentally tallying the lot of them as either Decepticons or Decepticon sympathizers by who they reported to, or at least some bots she could kill without annoying any of her officers, the sniper aimed for the apparent leader as he opened his mouth components to respond to his fellow femme.

(ooo000ooo)

Perceptor was not having a good cycle.

It had actually started out well; he had a minor breakthrough with one of his experiments on chemical additives in energon and managed to add a lead sulfide solution to an energon mix for those allergic to the main source of energy for Cybertronians.

However, when he had taken a brief hiatus in order to take in his own fuel he had been sparknapped and bound tightly, then dragged to the abandoned quarry outside of the city's walls by these rough and tumble Decepticon hopefuls. Struggling had not aided the scientist in anyway, and only encouraged the rough handling he had been suffering though.

Low on energy and sporting more than a few painful dents in both frame and armor, he had despaired of any bot realizing his predicament in time to assist him. His own associates would not realize he had been so callously disposed of until he failed to show up at another's lecture, and the usual inquires about his own work would go unanswered until some bot called in the Enforcers about a possible missing scientist. Then again, if the six bots intended to display his deactivated frame, his associates would realize he was gone a bit sooner than that.

Straining to snap at least the bindings around his wrist joints and therefore free himself before his deactivation occurred, Perceptor twisted around to shield his worst injuries when it looked like the leader intended to kick him as well, only to stall and watch in shock as the mech's helm disintegrated with the crack of a rifle's report before he could.

Four of the Decepticons twisted around, looking for the shooter in vain as the fifth, the femme, developed a hole of her own in an optic with another crack of whatever weapon had been turned on them. She thudded to the ground, energon and oil leaking freely from the hole punched all the way through her helm, as one of the mechs left traced the angle of the shots and pointed to where the shooter had to be. Only to grimace in pain as yet another shot rang out and clipped the fluid hoses in his throat supports.

The two mechs left ran for the singled out rock formation, the last one bleeding badly from punctured energon lines sank to the ground himself in a spreading pool of softly glowing spilled fluids.

The ringing clang of metal on metal rang out next, Perceptor twisted himself around again just far enough to see a grayish blue and black femme kick one of the mechs in the helm and swing the butt stock of her odd looking rifle in the faceplate of the other. The odd looking maneuver worked to unbalance the two mechs, and she shot them both through their spark chambers as they hit the ground, not even wincing when their sparks shorted out.

With an oddly blank expression on her face plates she shot the last mech bleeding out on the ground before subspaceing her rifle and kneeling next to him.

"Hold still." Since the femme had just saved him from an obviously undesirable fate, Perceptor stopped struggling as she tested the bindings holding his limbs at bay. "This might hurt; I've haven't had to do this for a while now."

She deployed a small energy knife and carefully sawed through the bindings, and as she predicted the energon rushing back into his depleted servos ached for a breem before fading to a tingling sensation.

Sitting up, the scientist took in the six deactivated frames of his attackers and the unmarred armor on the femme as he removed the clamps on his own mouth components so he could converse with the unknown femme dealing with the bindings on his legs. "Meditating on the movements you have taken in my liberation I must confess some interest to your function as well as your designation, although you now possess my gratitude in your opportune rescue nevertheless."

"Erm... I'm a sniper, and my name is Knightblade." Holding out a hand to the odd mech, she frowned at him tiredly when he just looked up at her blankly. "What?"

Perceptor hesitated for a brief moment before accepting the outstretched hand and allowed her to haul him to his pedes. "It is... unanticipated that you disclosed the reality of your function so straightforwardly to a bot you do not identify as an acquaintance or ally."

"Well, lying won't get me anywhere." The sniper shrugged dismissively as she set off for the highway, only to be halted by the mech setting his hand on her arm. She looked back at him with a good dose of irritation in her expression, not really all too happy with another delay in getting to the city. "What now?"

"May I inquire to what a sniper is undertaking this close to Crystal City," Perceptor peered at her chest armor closely for any sign of a decal or other marking, observing and dismissing the gold and silver device on her right arm as not what he was looking for, "and deficient of the faction insignias of either the Autobots or Decepticons?"

Knightblade gave an irritable rev of her engine. "My military unit is taking a break, at the most three vorns, and two if slag gets desperate."

She tapped the strange symbol on her arm that he had disregarded as if to identify the unit she had just left.

"We've been released to do whatever, as long as we corporate with the local Enforcers about our city's defenses. I am here more as a bot interested in science, rather than a sniper at the moment." She extracted herself from the mech's grip and started walking again. "Now, if you're done asking questions, I'm going to get to the city so I can finally get some recharge this cycle."

"Very well, although..." Perceptor had to smile at the rapidly growing annoyance of the femme's as she turned back to him again. "My personal designation is Perceptor, and if it would not be too presumptuous, I extend an invitation for you to take your respite within my individual living unit. It has come to be apparent that further security procedures are necessary, and I can at the very least direct your own ventures into the life of a researcher in return."

The sniper hesitated just long enough for the scientist to catch up to where she was. "That is extremely convenient, and a little suspicious. What aren't you telling me?"

"I possibly will be confronted by Decepticons again, and would certainly have need of your own quite competent defensive capabilities when that eventuality transpires."

"Ah." She looked back at the six she had already killed that cycle, then to the scientist awaiting an answer from her. "I don't see why not. Just so you know; I can be called up by either my old commanders or the Enforcers and be forced to leave for a short while."

"That is acceptable." Perceptor gave the deactivated frames a searching look of his own before continuing with her to the highway. "I am not certain whether to categorize this as an auspicious or disastrous commencement of our agreement."

"Why not both?" Knightblade just laughed wickedly when he gave her a flat look in return for her flippant comment.

\V/

Finding the bots Prowl had asked of her hadn't been as difficult as she thought it would be given the size of Praxus.

Rook found Smokescreen first, the Praxian mech was a diversionary tactician for the Praxus' Enforcers as a simple name search of the city's information servers in the Hall of Records had revealed. Working off a hunch of hers following the mech had led her to the other, a Praxian framed merchant named Bluestreak.

Smirking, she watched them from across a busy street as the two brothers, she mentally tallied Prowl as another possible brother, discussed something between them.

She was more than a little surprised when Smokescreen's door-wings twitched and he turned around to glare at her for staring at them, but not undaunted from the less than welcoming gesture. He was an Enforcer after all, something like the police back in the Milky Way, and they hadn't liked her much at first either.

Skillfully weaving through the traffic clogged streets, the gray saboteur walked up to the two Praxians with an ever widening smirk twisting her lip plates. "I've been looking for you two."

"Us? Why would you be looking for us? You don't look like an Enforcer friend of Smoky, he wouldn't be glaring at you if you were, and I don't think I've ever seen you before, so you're not another merchant, so why are you looking for us?" Bluestreak peered at her curiously, his own door-wings fluttering in confusion.

Her smirk grew into a broad grin. Dealing with their Praxian XO had given her a bit of insight about Praxians and their door-wings; Shadowdancer had downloaded the sub-language and practically forced it down the other's intakes so they could understand any Praxian they came across as well as the sub-language of the seeker frame sets even if they didn't use much themselves. Bluestreak was curious and confused, Smokescreen was confused and wary, and it was almost cute how 'Smoky' glared at her.

"I have some messages from a mech by the name of Prowl." 'Prowl' was apparently some kind of magic word. Both Praxians straightened up instantly, casting wary looks around to see who was close enough to overhear. "Relax, besides you, 'Smoky'; there are not any other Enforcers around."

Rook took a seat from a nearby table and seated herself at theirs, ignoring the renewed glare aimed at her from the Enforcer.

"Oh. Okay. What message did Prowl give to you to tell us?" Smokescreen groaned and covered his optics with one hand as the merchant all but bounced out of his chair in excitement. "Is he alright? I mean, I know he was in trouble for a few vorns, the whole... ya know, 'incident' thing. I was really worried about him being alone by himself for so long. Are you a friend of his?"

"You can read for yourself, yes, don't know, and sort of." Rook's smile softened when Bluestreak blinked at her in surprise, unaccustomed to having all his questions answered so rapidly. She passed out two data pads to the Praxians and leaned back in her purloined chair. "Met him when my unit passed through Iacon, he's a tactician for the Autobots now. It looks like he's doing well for himself."

"Unit?" Smokescreen glanced over her armor curiously, noting the lack of a faction insignia on her strangely shimmering armor except for the gold and silver glyph on her arm plates. "What unit would that be?"

"Sorry, that would be telling." Rook winked and wiggled her fingers at him before getting up. "Sides, I'm just paying back a favor. See you around, _Smoky_ , Blue."

Bluestreak only responded to her absently, already rapidly reading though what Prowl had written to him. "Bye!"

Smokescreen had half risen out of his own chair, before sinking back into it as he lost sight of her in the traffic passing by.

"Frag it, I didn't catch her name." When his younger brother looked up worriedly, he waved a hand so the merchant would go back to reading. "I'll get it later, and see just what unit that femme is out of, if she even is from a military unit."

"She never said it was a military unit, she just said unit." Blinking bemusedly, Bluestreak looked up as his brother cursed again. "You have a physical description of her, would that work?"

"Gray isn't an unusual color for a bot to have." The Enforcer tapped his fingers on the table between them, glaring at the data pad the femme had delivered to him. "You're gray, Blue."

"True," with an accepting twitch of his door-wings, the younger merchant thought through the conversation with the femme again from a new perspective, "...it sounded like she intends to see us again."

Smokescreen frowned irritably before snatching up the data pad and subspaceing it to look at later. "Terrific. She's a possible criminal lurking around just waiting to bother us, who our brother happens to trust to deliver messages. That just makes my orn."

\V/

Frowning at the sheer mess arrayed in front of her, Holdout compared the inventory list given to her to the piles of parts and goods that stretched out in the warehouse.

Central City's Autobot base recently let go their supply personnel when it became apparent that some bot was skimming off the shipments and selling them on the streets for a tidy profit. That was a good thing for her, since there was an opening in her chosen job field, but a bad thing in that she now had to organize the mess herself. There would be other supply bots coming in, the Wrecker Commander Impactor had assured her, and she would have help before the megacycle was out, just... not quite yet.

And... oh yeah. If she could find that shipment meant for Iacon sometime in the next few cycles, it would be really great.

Optic ridge twitching in barely contained rage at the chaos before her, the SPARTAN trained tracker ignored the mess for the moment and put her skills to what she considered good use. Hunting down the worthless bot would keep her from blowing a gasket or two at the mess he left behind him.

It took her a breem of searching the badly concealed alterations to the ledgers to find where the old supply bot had sold off his ill-gotten gains, another two to assemble the shipment for Iacon, and with a quick word with Impactor she had a break during which to find the irritating bot in.

The merchant she found had no idea the supplies he had bought were stolen from the Autobots, and volunteered the information about what the bot looked like for free. Holdout was tracking a mech with green and orange paint, who had passed by the merchant during the off-cycles up until a few megacycles ago.

Tipping the mech anyways, the tracker made her way farther into the merchant's district, asking a bot here and there to ensure she was still on the right track. With half the joor she had been allotted for a break left, she found the optic smarting green and orange mech.

He had used his illegal cut of the Autobots' supplies to buy himself a living unit, kitted out with more than a few luxuries. This included more than just a few cubes of high grade, apparently.

The mech was flat on his back, recharging without a care in the world on his berth, falsely confident in how well he had covered his tracks. Holdout huffed in disgust at both the slovenly mech and the way he lived.

About to enter the room and rough the mech up for her troubles before handing him over to the Enforcers to deal with, the tracker paused as an idle thought crossed her processor. Refit was going to live with her while she attended the Academy, and this living unit was between both the Autobot base and the Academy.

With a wicked grin that even Shadowdancer would be impressed with, the tracker quietly made her way father into the room with a different plan.

(ooo000ooo)

When her break was over, Holdout dutifully reported back to Impactor before returning to the sheer mess in the warehouses. The Wrecker Commander shook his helm in confusion over her actions as he turned back to his own data work.

Not two joors later, a pair of Enforcers interrupted him when he was talking to Sandstorm about the new bronze and black femme in supply. "Can I help ya, Sergeant?"

The Enforcer Sergeant looked a bit... odd as he turned his attention to the data pad he was holding. "Err... we have a mech in the holding cells that match the description of your missing supply bot, suspected of stealing from your stores. Funny thing is, he was caught entering a bronze and black femme's flat, and she called him in for trespassing, after beating the slag out of him."

His partner was less confused at the strange turn of the conversation, having dealt with a lot of military units in his function. "We do have to request that if you're going to send that femme after any of the others you suspect may have had a hand in this issue, you at least give us a helms-up about it."

Sandstorm blinked bemusedly at Impactor, who looked a little more than just confused himself. "Uh, right. I'll keep that in my processor."

They both waited only long enough to watch the two Enforcers leave the office before making for the supply and storage part of the base as fast as they could.

They found Holdout muttering evilly under her intakes about half-clocked glitches that couldn't do an orn of honest work if his function depended on it, half in and half out of a crate trying to inventory it. She twisted around after an astrosecond to glare at them both with her odd orange optics. "Can I help you?"

"Uh... Holdout, what did ya do before ya came here?" The Wrecker Commander was trying to figure it out on his own, he knew the femme had come down from Iacon and had expressly asked for a position in supply, but anything else about her was still a mystery to every bot as she hadn't been in the city for long.

The femme blinked at him from her precarious perch, twisting a bit to get a better look at the two of them.

"I'm a tracker. My unit's taking a brief break, and I'm here trying to survive the next two to three vorns until War' calls us back." She shrugged idly, almost dislodging herself from her position. "Any particular reason why you're asking?"

"Um, yeah. The Enforcers said to give them a warning before you go after any of the others." Impactor stared in confusion at her as she appeared to consider it.

"Okay. If they want me to I will, since they asked so nicely." Holdout turned back to what she was doing, giving the two mechs the distinct impression that they had been dismissed.

Sandstorm had to be physically guided out of the room, as the mech had the weirdest look on his face plate and was nearly unresponsive to the other mech as he stared up at the back of the femme.

The Wrecker Commander was wondering if anything else would show up and attempt to stall his processor when the mech turned to him and said, "I wonder if she would go on a date with me?"


	8. Chapter 8

Warcry let himself into the med bay, only to take a step back with a grunt as Refit all but threw herself at him with a ringing trill of excitement. "Holdout said she's ready for me! I can attend the Academy in the next term, isn't that great?"

"Oh, yeah... terrific." The SPARTAN-Bot CO shifted his grip on the tan and black femme, setting her back on her pedes only to watch as she just about bounced around the walls of the med bay.

The tank blinked at the unusually hyper femme, bubbly she may be but at least Refit was normally calm if cheerful most of the time.

"Gale' will be taking you to where Hold' is in a few megacycles, and... 'fit, is that necessary?"

The femme had picked up a welder and advanced on the SPARTAN-Bots' CO with a broad grin.

"You have a crack in your armor plating, caused most likely by sparring with either Optimus or Ironhide, and you wandered into the med bay on your own." She pointed to a nearby berth for him to go to. "Sit, complaining will only make this take longer."

Warcry shot the shaking shoulders of Xenon, who had been using one of the berths near the back of the med bay as a desk to conform to how the SPARTANs had adjusted to the ex-AI's fears of being alone, a half-sparked glare as he complied. "You know, ever since that medical upgrade you gave her, she's been acting more and more like Ratchet."

The Autobots' CMO cleared his face plate of any amusement and gave the tank a serene smile. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I take it that whoever it was that cracked your armor is also on their way here with a few repairs needed?" The slightest SPARTAN femme asked sweetly as she deftly unlatched the CO's left shin plate and flipped it over to weld up the crack snaking up the inside.

Xenon failed to mute a few snickers at that, and Warcry groaned as he placed a hand over his optics.

"Yeah, Ironhide's on his way, he wrenched a few gears in his right arm." With an exasperated sigh blown out of his vents, the tank took back his newly mended shin plate as Refit handed it over and started looking the rest of him over for anything she could fix. "Like I was saying, a few megacycles and Gale' will take you to Hold's flat, then the orn after that she will take you to the Academy to get registered for the next round of medical classes."

(ooo000ooo)

Wheeljack grimaced with good humor behind his battle mask as Ratchet gave him his usual lecture about the risks he ran in ignoring the few injuries he got from his usual antics in his lab. The two were in the medic's office, getting the last bits of their usual routine of leave taking out of the way before the inventor left for Crystal City later that cycle.

"Really, Ratch', how many times have we done this?" He pulsed some blue light from his vocalizer fins as his friend took a break from his habitual rant to answer him.

"More than I care to count, you slagger. And yet, you still return here with a few cracks in your fragging support struts and more than a couple of Pit-be-damned stripped gears." The Head Medic of Iacon pinned his friend with a glare over a cube of high-grade.

After a moment, the yellow medic grinned wickedly with his own brand of humor.

"I got Knightblade to promise to check up on you every few decacycles, so your usual excuse of failing to schedule a Primus blessed medical appointment after your fragging explosions no longer applies."

"Oh yeah, she's there now. Hey, I wonder if I ask nicely, would she let me mess with a sample of her protoform?" Wheeljack ignored the implications of the sniper visiting him on Ratchet's orders, and concentrated on the few questions he still had about the SPARTANs and their All-Spark made frames.

The question of the bluish tint to their alloy hadn't been solved to his satisfaction; the liquid metal crystal mix had looked grayish to him in the lights of both Iacon and the _ATHENS_ ' cargo bay.

Ratchet blinked at the rapid change of topic. "You would have to actually ask the fragger, but if you remember, can you ask her about that silver blue slag that leaks out of their armor every now and again?"

"What blue slag?" The inventor leaned forward a bit in barely contained curiosity.

"They said the system it leaks out of was a medical monitoring system." The medic leaned back in his chair in response to his friend's forward movement. "It's blue and stings a bit where it contacts any part of a Cybertronians' metal, either armor or frame."

"Huh... yeah, I'll ask. That's kinda weird though."

Wheeljack stroked along the bottom of his battle mask as he thought. "If it's medical in nature, even if it was made for their organic selves, how could it harm a Cybertronian?"

He spent a silent moment thinking that though, unable to even speculate what the blue leaking stuff could be.

"So... does this mean you're done yelling at me?"

"No," Ratchet wickedly grinned at the green pulse of light from his friend's vocalizer fins, "I haven't even got to my favorite part yet."

\V/

Sneaking in to Gygax had its own issues, even with the SPARTAN Covert Ops training Shadowdancer and Trickflip had to fall back on to get into places they weren't wanted.

The Decepticons had a number of sentries and patrols that were not any great difficulty for the two, but the guard posts and security measures, or rather the cameras and detection systems, posed more of a threat. The two couldn't disable or alter any of them, not without alerting any bot that there was something wrong and they didn't know if Gygax had procedures in place to prevent just what they were going to be doing.

It was Trickflip that found the underground tunnels first, and proposed it as a viable way into the Decepticon controlled city. During their first megacycle out of the _ATHENS_ , the two mapped as much of the tunnels as they dared; noting the exits, where in the tunnels one was likely to see the decrepit bots that lived there, and any obstacles that had collapsed or been piled into place, and compared them when they stopped for the cycle. Now with an escape route and a way to get around without being observed, Shadowdancer released Trickflip to assist Orpheus in his city.

On her own, the Praxian tactician spent a few more cycles just observing the normal flow of the civilian populace and the occasional ventures taken by the Decepticon soldiers. She had no reason to hurry, as haste in any covert operation usually spelled disaster for the operative.

Therefore she used most of the timeframe Ratchet had reluctantly calculated between refueling needs of a SPARTAN picking a method of inserting herself into the daily cycle routine of Gygax proper.

She eventually picked to become a gladiator, not by any means her first choice of occupation. Being a bot with the frame type of _femme Praxian_ would make her a bit more noticeable to the spectators, but anything else would require more credits than she had and she could always switch later on. Her minimal refueling needs would let her collect more credits than she would spend, and if she could locate an abandoned building out of the more heavy traffic she wouldn't need to spend any on a place to live beyond purchasing that and refurbishing it on her own.

She eventually found some bot that owned an arena ring and would let her 'get her own aft kicked', in the mech's own words. The Praxian probably took an excessive amount of enjoyment in collecting her winner's fee after the bout, which included the bonus for 'deactivation of the opponent'.

He later introduced himself as Dreadnought, after he spent a few moments gaping at the femme that took less than a breem to kill his latest audience drawing gladiator, and asked her to spend the off-cycle hanging around so he could talk to her later on.

Not seeing a reason to leave the dingy bar that early, Shadowdancer ordered a cube of high-grade and snuck off to the very back of the sub-basement arena to watch the less than prepared mechs and femmes take the ring in hopes of winning themselves a meager amount of credits.

Almost totally bored and about to slink out after about three joors of watching the worse fighting she had ever seen before; the fight fixer came back for that promised 'talk'. "So, femme. I gotta ask, but are ya a Decepticon or just a slumming death match gladiator?"

"Neither," Shadowdancer brushed a hand across her chest plates, bare of any faction insignia, "I'm just a... tourist, of a type."

Dreadnought gave the strange Praxian a long look. By frame type, Praxians were usually rather peaceful and annoyingly pacifistic, only a few ever got angry or irritated enough to actually attack or damage an opponent at any time in their functions. This femme though, she killed without qualm and had a wicked sense of humor, if what she just did to his credit store was any indication.

"Really, let's say I believe ya. What are ya doing here then? This ain't exactly a tourist spot."

"Whatever makes you say that?" She purred back to him, making more than a few warnings about tugging a turbo-cat's tail spring to the forefront of his processor. "Besides, what else could I be?"

"...right then, if ya insist. Got a job for ya, femme. If yore interested, that is."

Shadowdancer carefully leaned back in her chair, balancing her door-wings on the chair's back and kicking her pedes up on the table. "I'm listening."

Dreadnought had about a moment to wonder if he was still sane, before she pinned him with an annoyed glare and he got down to business. "I need another crowd drawer. Ya deactivated my last one, an ya could take his place. Pays a bit better than just being a gladiator and ya still get any death fee ya collect in the ring."

The tactician considered the offer for a moment, buying time by sipping from her cube. "What are the terms of this... employment?"

"Ya can fight in any of the other rings, ya just need to at least have one scheduled bout here every cycle. An they could be either a crowd challenger or another gladiator."

She gave a breem of processing to work in the offer in her projected plan for the next two or three vorns, letting the large mech worry for a bit. "Fine, but I do reserve the right to quit at any time."

"Fine with me, femme. Welcome ta Gygax."

The SPARTAN-Bots' XO shook the heavy hand held out to her with her clawed one and a wicked grin. "It's Shadowdancer. A pleasure, I'm sure."

\V/

Rook deftly hung upside down from the rafters, tracking her target as he made his way through the stacks of crates.

Bluestreak was in the middle of arranging some shipments out to another merchant in Vos, and the saboteur wondered if this was really the best time to be bothering the younger Praxian brother or if she should go and play tag with Smokescreen some more.

The saboteur took note of the time and sighed a bit mournfully. Smokey would be off shift at the moment, which meant she had to get down to the business that brought her here.

Letting go of the ceiling supports, Rook dropped to the floor behind the merchant, only a soft clang of her pedes on the floor giving her movement away.

Bluestreak ignored the sound, similar ones were produced by the internals of the self-sorting warehouse and he had no reason to think any bot other than himself was inside of the complex. With an Enforcer as a brother, he had an unusually good security system in place around his business.

The gray femme followed the Praxian around for a breem, amused to note that somehow Nitro had gotten on the merchant's list of consumers already.

"You know, it's a little rude not to announce yourself when you enter another bot's property. I mean, I could understand it if you owned the place, but since I own it I would like it if you at least said something instead of lurking behind me like a shadow."

Rook blinked in surprise, then gave the gray Praxian's door-wings a wry look. "Sorry, Blue. It's been awhile since I could be sneaky just to be sneaky, and I was enjoying it. Promise I won't do it again."

Bluestreak set his inventory data pad down on a nearby crate and turned to look at the sheepish femme standing behind him. He had clued in on her presence because she vibrated more than anything else in there, even if she didn't give off the same sounds as any other bot he knew. "Alright, but since you're here, I do have to ask why you are torturing my brother. It's funny, don't get me wrong, but he's getting rather irritable about it. Oh... and I'm supposed to ask you for your name, if you don't mind."

"Because Smokey is cute when he's irritable," the saboteur perched herself on top of another shipping container and grinned at the odd look that passed over the mech's face plate at her flippant comment of calling his brother 'cute', "and what if I do mind? I haven't done anything wrong, yet, and there is no reason for the Enforcers to know my name."

The Praxian's odd look turned into a small smile at that claim of innocence. "At least you're honest. So, what can I do for you?"

Rook dangled one leg off her impromptu chair and returned the smile with a sly one of her own. "Do you have any warehouses you don't use, near the slums? Or even if you know of one or two and can give me the addresses, I can leave you alone for the cycle."

"I have an empty warehouse next to the slums, but for some odd reason I think you already know that." Bluestreak gave the gray femme as searching stare, who just smiled a bit wider back at him. "I can sell it to you, if you want. But just so you know, I will tell Smokey that you stopped by and what you wanted."

"Fine by me. I'm not really hiding from him, just playing a game." The SPARTAN saboteur slid off the crate and back to the floor with a laugh. "Besides, there's no fun in playing if I have all the cards."

\V/

Holdout was finally finished with reorganizing the supply warehouses and the assorted inventories, and taking a break by inventorying the next shipments due to be shipped out to other bases.

Tallying up the last number of power couplers in a medical crate destined for Iacon, Xenon had told her of the number of times they had been shorted before she left Iacon and requested she do something about it if she did get a job at the base here, the tracker made the final notations for the orn on her checklist and decided to call it a cycle even if it was a bit early to do so.

She replaced the last data pad in the case next to her office wall, bid the other supply bots that had been hired on after her a good off-cycle, and made her way to the base's exit.

On this particular orn she was in a bit of a hurry, because Galeforce had commed her that he would be leaving Iacon with Refit last cycle and the two should be nearing her living unit by now. As intent as she was on getting home this cycle, she still couldn't ignore Sandstorm as he called out her name just as she was crossing the last few feet to the base's main entrance.

"Yo! Holdout! Wait up, femme!" Stopping, as the mech had proved that he could and would keep yelling even if she tried to ignore him, the tracker gave the larger mech an irritated look over her shoulder. "Is there something wrong? Ya don't usually leave this early."

With her lip plates thinned into a line, she had caught sight of a mildly amused Impactor a ways behind the orange and black Wrecker, Holdout turned around to address her rather vocal admirer.

"Nothing is wrong, but I have guests expected this orn, and would like to greet them. Sir," she nodded to the Wrecker Commander as he finally walked up to the two, idly fiddling with the harpoon he had in place of his right hand, "the shipments for Iacon and Crystal City are assembled, and are awaiting your convenience to dispatch."

"Good to know, so... what's this about you having guests?" Impactor grinned widely as she flat out glared at him for continuing the conversation before she could make good on her escape.

He had clued in on the fact that she behaved like any other soldier he had, and would not tell him to mute it if he asked a question even if she didn't want to answer. He suspected that it had to do with her temporarily disbanded unit, and shamelessly used the advantage to Sandstorm's benefit in his pursuit of the femme.

"My... I guess you could say they are my cohort. Galeforce and Refit are visiting me, because Refit is interested in becoming a medic in addition to her function of a navigator." The tracker rubbed the side of her left forearm plate, casting a glance to the entrance before looking back at the two mechs. "They are supposed to be here, barring any unfortunate incidents, in about a joor or so."

Sandstorm bristled up his armor in aggravation at the news, causing Holdout to blink at him in confusion. "And this Galeforce bot is?"

"Err... a mech I know from my unit. He's escorting Refit here, because she doesn't have any great combat capabilities herself." She had never seen a bot do that before, and spent a moment looking over the flared up armor in complete bewilderment.

The orange and black Wrecker puffed up a bit more at her attention and declared, "Well, I'm coming with."

She jerked her optics up to look at him in surprise. "What?"

Sandstorm nodded, more to himself than at the femme and started off to the base's gates. "You just leave everything to me. I'll deal with this Galeforce mech."

Holdout gave the back of the mech a disbelieving stare, before turning to address the still grinning Impactor. "Please tell me he doesn't know where I live."

"It was a part of the Enforcer's report about your tracking down and apprehending that old supply bot," the Wrecker Commander gave the now frantic femme a blasé shrug, "he knows."

(ooo000ooo)

Refit had all but begged Galeforce to spend at least a few joors exploring the city she would now be living in with the unit's tracker. They located both the Cybertronian Academy and the Central City Autobot Base, a few more rather interesting looking locations around the city, then stopped at an energon vender nearby the address Holdout had given Warcry as the location of her living unit.

The femme was twisting around in her chair, looking at the bright colors and busy bots that made up the population of Central. Galeforce was more concerned with the time, wondering if Holdout had left the base for the cycle yet or not.

"Isn't it all pretty, Gale'?" The ex-AI gave an impressed twitter as she admired the color coordination of the Cybertronians, wondering if she could pull off that shade of pale blue with her yellow optics.

"Um, yeah... pretty," the combat engineer gave the same bot a confused look, wondering why he also had the shade of violent yellow-orange with the pale blue, "uh... 'fit, before you get a new paint job, you should probably ask Hold' for input first. She's a femme; they are usually good with... uh... harmonizing color schemes so they don't clash _that_ badly."

"Clash? I think he looks striking." She turned back around in her chair in time to see the odd look that crossed the SPARTAN mech's face plate at her claim. "No, I'm not being difficult. I do like that color combination, Gale'."

"Uh... right," wisely turning the conversation to a different topic, thinking Holdout could take care of that one, the mech noted the arrival of a service drone carrying their energon arriving, "well. Fuel first, then will go see if Hold' is done for the orn yet."

Since the Cybertronian version of a café required a bot to pay before getting their fuel, the two left the small seating space after Refit had finally gulped the last of her cube down. They decided to walk to the tracker's living unit, not really in any mood to rush.

About a street away from the address, the two could faintly hear the sound of Holdout yelling at some bot. Both of them had different ideas about how to approach a possibly annoyed femme.

Refit wanted to give the SPARTAN another few breems, concerned that the soft spoken Supply Officer had actually found a bot she didn't like. Galeforce wanted to go and annoy the femme further; he had not had the opportunity to annoy Holdout quite yet and was looking forward to it.

Galeforce eventually won that argument; he was significantly stronger than the femme and dragged her down the last street just to see what was going on.

Holdout _was_ yelling at a bot. An orange and black mech, with a purple and yellow one sitting on the steps to the femme's flat, laughing at the both of them. Unfortunately for the combat engineer's curiosity, the tracker spotted the two before he could hear just what she was yelling about.

"Oh, _Primus_... fine then Sandstorm, meet my _siblings_ , Refit and Galeforce." The bronze and black femme waved a hand to the two bots behind the larger mech as she tiredly sighed.

Sandstorm turned around only to be greeted with a chirr of amusement and bright yellow optics.

"Are you a friend of Hold's? She normally doesn't yell, like at all." He took a step back to get a good look at the femme, painted tan where Holdout had bronze but otherwise looked like a slimmer version of the tracker. "I'm Refit."

Galeforce just gave the three Central bots a sly grin and a wave. "Can I ask what you were yelling about, Hold'?"

"No," the tracker glared at him irritably before all but shoving Impactor off her door step, "I've had enough of slag that annoys me. Refit, did you refuel this cycle, or do you need me to get you some?"

"I'm good. Gale' took me for some just before we started for your home." The ex-AI gave the other femme a sly smile, not moving from her position in the middle of the street with Sandstorm. "Are you going to introduce me or what?"

Holdout frowned at her, but grudgingly complied with the proper protocol of introducing the bots.

"That's Sandstorm, one of the triple changers in the Autobot Assault unit called the Wreckers. This snickering lump of metal here is Impactor, the Wreckers' Commanding Officer," she shot the laughing purple and yellow mech a flat glare, "who is absolutely no help at all."

Refit beamed at the two, thrilled beyond measure that they felt comfortable enough with her SPARTANS to tease one to the point of aggravation.

"As you already have heard, I'm Refit, and that over there," the ex-AI gestured to the green and gray mech behind her, "is Galeforce."

Sandstorm blinked at the other mech, who was giving Holdout a strange look.

After a moment of silent conversation over the SPARTANs' comm lines, most of which was getting the entire story out of the slightly embarrassed femme for leverage over her later, the green and gray mech shook his helm in fond amusement over his sister's predicament and looked to the tan and black femme.

"Whatever, Hold'. 'fit, I'm going to head back to Iacon now, keep in your processors that if you want a new paint scheme, hash it out with our dear tracker first." Galeforce tapped the femme on the helm in goodbye before turning around and leaving the four bots still standing in the streets.

Holdout ran her hand over her face plate before heaving a tired sigh. "Thank Primus and all his avatars. Refit, are you going to come in or do you want to spend the off-cycle talking to Impactor and Sandstorm out here?"

"Can't I do both?" Refit grinned at the dismayed look that cross the tracker's face and the excited look on Sandstorm's. She had a feeling that living with Holdout was going to be fun.

\V/

The chipper ex-AI spent most of the off-cycle chatting up the pair of Wrecker mechs, only pouting a little when Holdout finally got irritated enough to throw the two out of her home, using the excuse that the little femme needed to recharge sometime that cycle.

Holdout had a plan around the slighter femme's panic attacks, they both would recharge in the same room just as Rook had when she had comforted the pilot when the SPARTANs were all in the _ATHENS_ together.

The start of the next cycle saw one way too excited femme and one wishing that some other bot had Central. Holdout barely had time to register that she was awake an entire joor earlier than her usual routine before Refit pounced on the older femme, landing on her thigh plates and all but trilling, "Good orn, Hold'!"

A stutter of the tracker's intakes answered the ex-AI; Holdout tried and epically failed to contain a yawn. "Good . . . orn, 'fit. I take it you're eager to start your classes?"

"Yes! Oh . . . I wonder if I'll make some friends, or if being a medic is hard?" Refit babbled on as she rolled of the tracker and to the floor, rambling out loud about what could happen and what she would do if said events happened.

The bronze and black femme tiredly smirked as she got up as well. It seemed that their dear XO's personality and habit for planning out slag that would or could happen had rubbed off on the littlest SPARTAN femme.

The two spent half the joor puttering around the living unit, Refit took a spin through the flat's wash rack and the tracker had to remain nearby just in case. The former AI was slowly but steadily working though her phobia of being alone, and was dearly grateful that the SPARTANs were allowing her to cling to them as she slowly worked her way through it.

Afterwards, Holdout took the younger femme to the same Cybertronian café that she and Galeforce had visited last cycle, before the two headed off to the Cybertronian Academy.

Holdout stopped at the offices, signing in the femme for the medic's course and paying the tuition fees with credits donated over the last ten megacycles by all of the working SPARTANs. She took the opportunity to ensure that she would have enough time to get here and pick up Refit for the first term, smiling weakly when one of the Instructors remarked on what a dedicated sibling she was.

The tracker escorted Refit to her first class of the orn, a type of 'Academy Rules 101', if the Cybertronians had such a thing. Pausing right before the doors, Holdout turned to the bubbly femme and frowned at her. "You do know what to do when -"

"Yes, yes. Comm if there is a problem, any problem. If I don't comm you, it is a reason for you to come by and ensure that everything is going well." Refit bounced on her stabilizers, grinning and way too excited for the tracker's peace of processor. "I know, Shadow' recited the same rules to me when I asked her about doing this."

"I still can't believe you got that femme to agree to you going off like this." The bronze and black femme scowled at the now sheepish look on the faceplate of the ex-AI.

"There may or may not have been a _lot_ of mid-grade involved. Trickflip wanted to see if the energon produced by the _ATHENS_ would be enough to allow a SPARTAN to become overcharged. By the way, it works." Refit giggled at the shocked look of the other femme's. "The Covert Ops bots made doubly sure of it. Did you know that Shadow' and Rook are cuddly when their drunk? And Orpheus gets rather... loquacious?"

Holdout heaved a sigh though her vents.

"No _wonder_ she let you go... that was devious, 'fit." The tracker shook her helm, trying to dislodge the image of the overcharged Covert Ops bots from her processor; it was causing her some error messages. "Alright, you asked for it, so go and enjoy it. I'll be here the fifteenth joor to pick you up, that's about five breems before your last class ends for the cycle."

\V/

Clearsight smirked as her section supervisor glowered at her again. Not that the mech had any reason to, seeing as all of her work was done again and well before the usual time the other data clerks finished with their own work.

Leaving her with a bit of free time to work on her own investigations, whether he liked it or not.

Her skills in interpreting scouting reports and predicting the movements of enemy troops had worked themselves into an uncanny knack for data sorting, and the Hall of Records in Ankmoor were always short a few skilled bots. She traded off working for them on occasion for access to the Hall's ancient records, supplementing her time between actually working and researching odds and ends of the Cybertronian life out for her fellow SPARTANs.

As far as the administration bots knew, she was sounding out a hunch for her 'friend', a scientist in Crystal City.

Which was technically true.

As per Holdout's orders, if the data Shadowdancer wanted checked out actually checked out she would pass the information and the theory to Knightblade. As it was the scout spent as much time on that as investigating the quips and strange statements, the occasional historical facts that the SPARTANs were supposed to know as sixty some odd vorns old bots.

Quite honestly Cybertronian history was _fascinating_ , if you could piece through it, and the scout excelled in being a data analyst.

Primus wasn't just the name of the Cybertronians' main god, he was supposedly also some trans-dimensional warrior for good and light who trapped himself and his 'evil' brother, Unicron, into two dead planets.

When Unicron started to transform his physical prison into a form capable of movement, Primus used his own power to create the first Cybertronians to counteract his brother, seven in all. The end of the battle had Unicron trapped in a black hole and Primus powered himself down so his brother couldn't use the bond between them to find his way back, leaving the original Cybertronians to craft the next generations of Cybertron and prepare for the eventual return of Unicron.

Those seven original Primes sent out to find other sources of the energy called 'energon', pretty much blowing up stars to harvest the energy released, with one rule. They agreed to never harvest a star that supported life, and amassed a decent amount of the energy with a machine called the 'Sun Harvester' and the 'Matrix of Leadership'.

One of the seven now known as 'The Fallen', a bit of digging showed that he had originally be called 'Megatronus Prime', had tried to break that rule only to be stopped by his brother Primes. The fight was over when the six remaining original Primes sealed the Matrix away, using their own frames as the tomb.

Now Cybertron was a delicate balancing act, as the core of the planet held the last known source of energon but even that was fading without the All-Spark to power the production of the fuel.

None of the SPARTANs knew just how to take that sheer amount of faith or the large amounts of historical data that quite frankly agreed with each other. Humans had their own struggle with one or many gods, but the near certainty displayed by the Cybertronians about their own origins left little to doubt.

It wasn't just the fact that a few of the 'original' Cybertronians were still functioning; Alpha Trion still existed and seemed to live near or around either Central or Iacon, or the 'Convent of Primus' religious scripture that Alpha Trion apparently kept with him; it was that the population of Cybertron was fully content to accept what they had been told as fact and Clearsight still couldn't find a reason or small little fact that would tip the cart, trans-dimensional warriors or not.

When Shadowdancer had activated her tactical uplink with the rest of the SPARTANs for the decacycle reports, Clearsight had spoken up about what she had learned of the Cybertronian religion, history, and the two nearly mythical but apparently real gods.

The silence that rang across the uplink after her report was nearly absolute with the exception of a softly uttered curse or two, as the once human SPARTANs tried to fit that with what they had always known. The mainly atheist ranks of the SPARTANs found any hint of a higher power nearly laughable but their own experience with the All-Spark, which was supposedly either Primus' own spark or a tool of some other power that gave Primus the energy to create the Cybertronians in the first place, made quite a few rethink their own stances on religion.

Eventually Shadowdancer and Warcry agreed that the subject would require more than just a tactical link to discuss, she was ordered to look into it more and the subject was dropped for another vorn or two. Although, none of the SPARTANs ever spoke of it, they unanimously agreed to not use the two names in vain.

Clearsight leaned back in her chair, one optic and half her processor on the 'extra' work she took on as the main data searcher for the SPARTANs, the other still on her surroundings and the bots nearby. It never paid to be an inattentive scout, even if a civilian setting hadn't been something she foresaw for herself in any previous short lived daydream.

A quiet beeping drew her attention from searching the Hall of Record's data tracks for references to something called the 'Quill' to the search she had started nearly a megacycle ago at Shadowdancer's behalf.

The title of the data file was 'Quintessons'.

\V/

Being a data courier was more about protecting the contents of one's files than actual speed in delivering them.

Some paranoid corporations and individual bots swore by the data couriers as the only way to get secure files anymore, as most data transfers between terminals could and have been hacked into. Quickgrip was relatively faster than most Cybertronians, but still relieved that he was being hired for his skills rather than features.

Data couriers have a physical mini hard drive that they take with them, the couriers report to whoever hired them to receive the files they are to transfer and where they are to take them, then upload the data where it was paid to be sent and the programs in the hard drive deletes their copy.

The gray and black mech had spent the first thirty or so megacycles just taking jobs around the city of Yuss; eventually extending the range he delivered to include the various bots and companies in the territory for the rest of the first decacycle.

Yuss itself was just at the foot of the Magnesium Mountains, and the bots that hired couriers could require one to scale the ranges for a delivery. It was rugged and tricky terrain, but still mostly easy to navigate for a SPARTAN-bot.

As a matter of fact the close-quarters weapon specialist had just finished a delivery to a bot that lived half way up the nearest mountain, and was tired and dented enough to be in a rather unhappy mood. Taking the fastest route to the ' _Platinum Pede: Courier Service_ ' building to finally report in and get the rest of the cycle off, Quickgrip nearly groaned when he caught sight of some bot he vaguely recognized from the courier firm's lobby being harassed by a few mechs.

Hesitating just out of sight, he debated on whether or not he should get involved. His indecision led him to watch as the vaguely familiar mech tried to escape by running his way, faster than he had ever seen anything move.

The blur of light blue, blue, and silver streaked past the SPARTAN mech, skidding into a left turn and out of sight. Only for the mech to streak back an astrosecond later with three other bots on his tail.

Quickgrip gave a tired grunt, alerting the six bots and the other courier to his presence. "You know, it's a bit late in the cycle to be doing this. If you fraggers back off now, I won't send you to the medics in a few dozen pieces."

The two toned blue and silver mech streaked to his side, talking about as fast as he could move. "I-am-really-happy-to-see-you, even-if-I-can't-remember-your-name-right-now, but-don't-you-think-we-should-be-running?"

"Oh, relax." Quickgrip shook off his aches and twinges, reenergized at the prospect of a fight. "This won't end well for them, not us."

The six mechs snickered at the percieved arrogance of the gray and black mech, closing in while taking a number of makeshift weapons out of their subspace. The SPARTAN mech returned their smirks, and pulled a decent length of a metal pole out as well. Their confusion was nearly audible, up until Quickgrip's improvised quarter-staff smashed one mech's helm in and swept to the side delivering a ringing smack to the side of another mech's faceplate.

One down, one disabled for the moment, and four left to go, the mechs clued in to the fact they were facing off with a bot that had more skill then they did, and tried to rush the gray and black mech.

Only one got close enough to watch in confusion as his makeshift club smacked harmlessly into some kind of barrier around the mech before getting the quarter-staff in one optic. The other three, having been the closest to the SPARTAN, got smacked around a bit by the pole of metal into the alley walls or each other before cursing the gray and black mech and dragging their broken fellows off.

Quickgrip watched them run off with a frown; he hadn't intended to kill that first one. "Well, that was short and disappointing."

"Actually, I-would-say-that-it-was-way-too-long-and-much-too-eventful-for-me." The other courier mech grimaced at the retreating backs of the other mechs, before shaking the SPARTAN mech's hand rapidly then dashing around the narrow street in a search pattern. "My-designation-is-Blurr, nice-to-meet-you, but-at-the-moment-can-you-help-me-look-for-my-drive?"

Looking around, the close-quarters weapon specialist spotted the slim device in a crevice of the left hand building.

"Over here, Blurr. And my name's Quickgrip." He scooped the gadget up and handed it off, before giving the other mech a backwards wave as he head off to the courier firm again. "But, if you don't mind, I need some recharge. See you later."

"Thank-you, Quickgrip! I-hope-I-see-you-later!"

\V/

As the assassin of the SPARTANs, Orpheus really didn't mind killing.

When he had been human, it had been the eventual end of all things anyways so if it just so happened to come early, oh well. When he had been approached by ONI to become more than his original occupation, a change from an assault specialist to assassin, he hadn't cared much at all.

Not caring anymore was taking more and more effort on his part, the longer he stayed where he was, both in Cybertron and Polyhex.

Waiting for Trickflip to join up with him in the Dead End district of Polyhex, the assassin had to sneer at the less fortunate bots just to get them to leave him alone. The broken, the malfunctioning, and the truly desperate lived in Dead End, the collection of motley bots missing more than just a few parts and limbs begging for help were a common sight.

They gave Orpheus the creeps.

When the infiltrator finally showed, a whole two joors late, it took more than he was willing to admit to retain his sarcastic façade. "What the frag took you so long?"

"Eh, well… there was this really cute femme two streets down, and she was asking-" Trickflip ducked the expected swing at his helm and straightened up to give the assassin a searching look. "I only just found the arena in the merchant's district, what got your wires twisted in a knot?"

"…nothing. Let's go already." Orpheus stomped off, a mildly bemused infiltrator following in his wake until he realized that he should be leading the assassin and hurried up a bit.

The two eventually slunk into the gladiator arena, a ring nearly hidden in the basement of some warehouse turned bar. Orpheus left Trickflip to see about setting himself up a few fights, the infiltrator spending the time chatting up the more overcharged mechs and femmes about the current events in Polyhex.

He didn't learn any more than he already had; most of the gossip either centered around the crowd favorites, or Dead End, and never about Governor Straxus himself or the Decepticons taking residence in the fortress of Darkmount. There were the usual rumors about which bots Straxus had tossed into the smelting pits and which gladiators won in the smelting pit ring, both of which gave the infiltrator a creepy itch in his back struts to hear about.

By the time Orpheus returned from getting assigned a fight in the ring, Trickflip had corralled a table in the back of the bar and had two cubes of the better version of high-grade served in the bar. "You may end up having to fight in those smelter rings if you want to continue your little mission out here."

"Considering what my mission is, and who gave it, I might just fight there for giggles." The assassin grinned evilly at the disgusted look on the other mech's faceplate. "I don't think Shadowdancer cares how I get the information, just as long as I do get it."

Trickflip grimaced as he sank down in his chair. "You know, I think I'm really going to hate it here."

\V/

Living with Perceptor was a perpetual test in linguistic exercises.

Knightblade had been amused to learn that while she could understand the articulate scientist with minimal problems, others were not so lucky in deciphering the lengthy and very wordy speeches Perceptor was prone to making. The mech eventually left all social calls to her, seeing as she could have a conversation in breems that would have taken him a few joors to explain and then re-simplify.

In return he usually was the one to handle the more mundane tasks left to researchers, that of the massive amount of note taking that the two eventually compiled between them.

A decacycle and about twenty megacycles into her stay in Crystal City, the sniper finally posed a question that had been nibbling on the edges of her processor for a while. She had promised Ratchet after all. "Do you know a mech by the name of Wheeljack?"

Perceptor paused and looked up to her where he was cataloguing the elements and metals he had in stock. The two of them were in the middle of inventorying the scientist's lab, and making sure they had not inevitably drained some resource or another in an odd investigation or two.

"I have not had the pleasure, but from the numerous rumors that reach me about his labor and principles, that is my personal deficiency."

"Um… if you insist. He's kind of…" Knightblade spent a moment processing how she wanted to describe the inventor, then figured that honesty would be better than white washing the usual antics of the mech, " _volatile_. Some of his experiments are downright dangerous for his health, and I promised a mutual… uh, friend that I would at least check up on the mech while I was here and nudge him into visiting the medics if needed."

"I had perceived that element of the abounding rumors to be an overemphasis of his effort."

"No, that's just 'jack." The sniper smirked at the wary look the scientist gave her for that. "Regardless, I do have to check up on the mech sometime soon. Would you like to come with me, or are you going to fiddle with the containers of noble gases again?"

(ooo000ooo)

"So, this is a...?"

"It is a device that resonances a sound for whoever is the tenant in the structure, summoning them to the entry and simultaneously apprising them to the detail that they have callers."

"Ah… what is so hard about saying: 'it's a door-bell'?" Knightblade peered at the button on the outside of a building, not entirely sure that she had the right address.

Perceptor gave his protector/assistant a fond glare, well aware that she was stalling and picking at his mannerisms in order to do so.

"Not all Cybertronians have such devices programmed to sound akin to a bell." The older scientist smirked at the irritated huff from the femme. "Such a statement could have been in error, if this Wheeljack had his own adjusted to sound as chimes."

He gave her less than a breem to waver about what she was going to do, pressing the button when the sniper seemed to hesitate a bit too long. Knightblade did take a moment to grin as the door-bell rang, proving it had indeed been a bell and not a chime, before wiping the expression off her faceplate and warily watching the still closed front door of the residence.

Perceptor kept his observations on the femme's own physical responses to himself, instead taking note on when she would act in the manner that most unnerved him. She hadn't volunteered much about herself other than she was a part of a unit that was on hiatus at the current moment, but the sniper's typical habits were much more telling than the femme herself.

Before long, a small tremor rocked the unit, and the sounds of some bot's pedes crashing through glass reached the audio receptors of the two standing outside. Knightblade gave a small smile at the disbelief that flashed across Perceptor's faceplate.

A sooty green and white mech finally pulled the door open, mildly cursing as he shook one leg to get the last of the glass splinters out.

"If you're here about that gizmo for the miners, it's not going to be done for another… oh, hiya Knight'!" Wheeljack beamed at the sniper, vocalizer fins flashing a bright blue. "Wasn't expecting you, Perceptor, but I've heard good things about you, it's a pleasure."

"Likewise, Wheeljack. I have perceived numerous noble anecdotes about your efforts as well." Perceptor gave the other mech a half-bow, as Knightblade rolled her optics.

"Heh, come in you two." The inventor held the door open for the both of them. "Don't mind the clutter; I never get around to cleaning anyways."

As the scientist and sniper entered the lab/residence of one Wheeljack, Autobot Inventor, the two had to suppress any desire to inquire if the mech wanted to get literally buried in his work.

Clutter was a polite way of putting the state of the inventor's lair.

Half-finished projects were stacked or pushed to the side of the rooms and data pads littered the tables and were mostly piled haphazardly on the data cases.

"Now that you're here, Knight', I got a few questions for you."

"Oh?" The sniper was more interested in seeing if she could locate the object that made the sound of breaking glass, and failed to note the mischievous flash of light.

"Me and Ratch' wanted to know what that, in his words, 'blue slag' that leaks out of your old medical monitoring system is." Perceptor raised an optic ridge, not entirely sure what the two were talking about as Knightblade twisted back around to glare at Wheeljack. "That and I was wondering what turned you all blue. The metal-crystal mix you proposed being the reason for that feature is gray."

The sniper opened her mouth components to yell at the mech, blinked at the mildly concerned look on Perceptor's faceplate, shut her components, and then started laughing as she realized she had be neatly caught. "You were planning this."

"Well, you haven't told him much, have you?" Wheeljack gave the femme a cheerful flash of bluish light. "The more processors we have on your little peculiarities, the faster we can catch any problems."

Inclining her helm to him, Knightblade gave them both a weak grin. "I can't tell him anything unless Shadow', Mark', and War' agree, and getting a message to them will take about a joor."

Perceptor looked between the both of them and worriedly asked, "Apprise me of what?"

(ooo000ooo)

Perceptor was clearly fascinated as Wheeljack chivvied the sniper out of her armor and began to show the older mech the distinctly blue sheen to her protoframe.

Knightblade sat on a stool the inventor had dug out of nowhere, both forearms bared of her armor plates. Her left arm was being inspected by the scientist, while Wheeljack was setting up to take a sample out of her right. "Are you sure this is going to help you find your blue tinting culprit?"

"Well… at the very least it should give us a place to start." The inventor had already collected a clear container already, and was in the process of tracking down the tools he would need somewhere out of the two's sight. "We've eliminated a lot of possibilities, so we're left with a very limited number of _culprits_ to pick from already."

He sounded close, but the sniper wasn't really willing to bet anything on his location.

Releasing Knightblade's left arm, Perceptor shook his helm as he tried to process why. "How is it conceivable for individual not to know which components went into one's creation?"

Wheeljack popped back into view to share a long look with the sniper as they tried to figure a way to answer without directly telling the older mech anything, before the sniper huffed once and patted Perceptor on the arm closest to her. "Bear with us a little longer. My commanding officers are almost done arguing whether or not to let you in on our slowly but steadily growing circle of 'in the know' bots."

"Speaking of which," the green and white mech wandered back into view, having ducked behind some old projects to get back to the area his guests were occupying, one hand holding a laser scalpel and the other bearing a pair of forceps, "what's the score so far?"

He gave a pulse of green and blue light as he sanitized the tools.

"Titan and Clearsight looked into Percy's history to quell Mark's concerns about a security risk," she ignored the older mech's own huff at the nickname, "Shadow' just asked Gale' if he was bothered by the idea of asking for an outside opinion, and he said no. War's only waiting for our XO to make up her processor before calling it in for a vote. As it stands, Markmaker is okay with telling, Shadowdancer seems to be leaning the same way, and Warcry is willing to trust my decision on this issue."

Knightblade rubbed her bare forearms as she looked over Wheeljack's tools with some trepidation.

"Well… this is going to suck _slag_."

"If I could find your pain receptors, I would most certainly turn them off for you… but since even Ratch' couldn't find them when he finally figured out you couldn't turn them off yourselves…" The inventor gave the femme a flash of violet light by way of apology as he set up for actually cutting into her, taking a moment to mentally brace himself for it.

Perceptor, who had wandered a bit to inspect the femme's removed armor plates, nearly dropped the durable metal plate as his helm snapped up to look at the two. "How then, do you two intend to circumvent inflicting the consequential perception of discomfort? Having one's protoframe carved into cannot be considered even a remotely agreeable experience."

"It's not," wincing, but holding herself still, the sniper kept her optics on the ceiling as the inventor made his cuts into her, "but none of the medics, engineers, or various scientists we have already seen have found any way to turn our pain receptors off. Shadow' even had Spotter, our hacker, try and find a way though our processors to turn the fragging things off, but he couldn't do it either."

When Wheeljack finally moved to take something out of her arm with the forceps, Knightblade finally turned her helm to inspect her newest injury, only to start frowning at the new hole.

"…uh, 'jack? Is that… supposed to be doing that?"

Concerned by the surprised tone in the femme's vocalizer, the two crowded around to peer into the sniper's arm. The inventor had inadvertently nicked one of the femme's coolant lines, except that the line was slowly bleeding something else besides the clear but red tinted coolant.

As the three watched, a small amount of metallic blue liquid gathered at the small cut in her line, slowly stopping the leak and sealing the minute amount of damage the inventor had caused the sniper. Wheeljack whistled though his vents as he quickly scooped the small amount that leaked out with the initial insult to the coolant line with the forceps.

"That's cool. I wonder if it would have sealed any injury to the protoframe as well, or at least mitigate some of the damage?" He transferred as much of the liquid as he could, still a mix of the coolant and the metallic blue liquid, into a separate container.

" _What_ is it?" Perceptor was still frowning into Knightblade's arm and at the blob of metallic blue that seemed to harden in front of his optics.

The sniper had a frown of her own, but this one was directed to the liquid the inventor had scooped up. The container was clear, so the clear red liquid suspending the small beads of metallic blue metal was visible.

"If pressed… I would say it is comparable in nature to platelets." She lifted her right arm to her optics, nudging at the seal over her slit coolant line. "It seemed to have the same effect, anyways… but that does raise a few questions of my own."

"What's a 'platelet'?" Setting aside the samples he had just taken out of the femme's frame, he could use a few moments before actually playing with the bits of metal and liquid, Wheeljack sat himself on the cleared portion of his work table.

"It's a human... well, an organic biology thing." Knightblade snatched up her forearm plates and deftly reattached them before settling back down on the stool. "Platelets where a component of their main fluid lines, that would… 'catch' on any tear and clump together when exposed to the outside environment. It sealed leaks and injuries, kept foreign objects out of their systems, and basically kept things contained until their slow manual repair systems could fix whatever had injured them… in, like, a cycle for most things, larger injuries would have taken about a megacycle."

The sniper cycled her vents slowly, using the current tactical uplink to pose a question to the SPARTANs not involved with deciding if Perceptor was acceptable addition to their list of informed bots.

"None of the others have been injured just yet, so the occurrence is still limited to me."

The older scientist raised an optic ridge, looking back between the younger bots.

"Human?" His processor tried to find the name in the know organic races he kept in his memory files. "I do believe you might be a prerequisite to enlighten myself of what is happening, before we go beyond this point."

The SPARTAN femme inclined her helm. "You're in luck, Percy. Shadow' finally got off the fence about you, and I have been authorized to request your opinion of current events. Now, first things first, this will require a bit of a history lesson, so hold any questions until the end. You see, a bit over half of a centivorn ago…"

(ooo000ooo)

The older scientist hadn't wanted to believe any of the stories told by the SPARTAN femme, until Wheeljack had shown him a few images of the SPARTAN corpses that had been removed from the _ATHENS_ and Knightblade showed him the vid of the All-Spark that Refit had taken close to five vorns ago.

Now nearly three joors later, the three had abandoned the inventor's lair and had started walking without a destination in their processors. Perceptor was in the lead, with the sniper following closely, she was still responsible for the older mech's safety, and the inventor bringing up the rear.

"The events you defined does illuminate a various quantity of… peculiar behaviors that you keep reiterating, Knightblade. I had pondered about the deficiency of polished behavior you possess, even if you surpass myself in social occasions."

The SPARTAN femme shrugged, knowing that the older mech couldn't see her and spoke up with what she hoped was an acceptable explanation.

"It's not too much different from interacting with military officers when I was not with other SPARTANs. There are just some personal things that are left out of any conversation with an unknown individual, a basic layout of a polite conversation with a greeting and a farewell, and you just try not to stumble onto something painful when forced to chat about non important details the rest of the time." She rubbed at her right arm again, still feeling an echo of pain from earlier in the cycle. "Your social customs and basic niceties in dialogue were the first things Refit, Spotter, and Clearsight checked out before researching anything else. I do believe their intent was to refrain from inadvertently insulting some bot before we got our pedes underneath us."

"No… you just knocked 'some bot' off his pedes." Wheeljack snickered as he recalled his rather embarrassing first meeting with Rook and the other SPARTANs on the _ATHENS_ , and how he had nearly melted a few wires in the resulting orns from his nearly overheating systems. "Although, you can now see why I wanted your help, Perceptor. It's not that I don't think I can really help them out on my own, but another set of optics on their untried, and unusual systems can't hurt."

Perceptor came to a halt in the middle of an empty street and turned around to look at the two following him.

"I suppose you are correct. However there is a technique in which to test new and advanced systems that are intergraded into a Cybertronian frame, and I believe the prudent progression of action would be to duplicate some of your systems, Knightblade, and check them using that process, ultimately working our efforts up to a complete frame."

The sniper, having only been a few steps behind the scientist, blinked her gold optics at the older mech as he frowned at her. "Percy… I really have no idea what you're talking about."

Snickering, Wheeljack patted the SPARTAN femme on the arm. "Don't worry, I know and I think it's a good idea. If you wouldn't mind Ratchet poking around in your frame, you shouldn't mind getting parts replicated for tests."

"Well… if you insist." Knightblade looked between the two mechs, wondering what she had just signed herself up for. "But, just to warn you, I don't have very many good memory files of 'tests'."


	9. Chapter 9

"Try kicking higher."

"Okay." Bluestreak took up the strange fighting stance the gray femme had taught his class, balancing his weight on his left pede and kicking at the older femme with his right. Rook caught the merchant's pede easily, holding it level with the Praxian mech's helm and nearly unbalancing the mech when he tried to break the femme's grip on his leg.

"Hmm... not quite." The SPARTAN saboteur released the mech's leg, and gave the merchant a long look before laughing. "It's not that you're not kicking high enough, it's that you're not kicking hard enough."

Rook gave her favorite first level student a gaming grin.

"When you're being attacked by a bot, you're not trying to amuse them, Blue. You're trying to get them to think again about trying to accost you." The gray femme turned back to her class of bots that professed no knowledge about fighting for their own defense, and addressed them. "When you spar, try not to think about how friendly your opponent is, or they will hurt you."

She grinned at the self-depreciating laughter that rang through her warehouse turned dojo.

"When you're good enough to knock me back a few inches, doesn't matter how, we'll get to the next move." The motley collection of bums and beggar bots that made up this last class of the cycle broke up into pairs again; Bluestreak remained with the 'sensei' at the front of the classroom. "Did I ever get around to thanking you for doing this for me?"

"Like I said the last time you tried to thank me, as long as I can attend without paying, we're even." The gray Praxian gave the femme a flutter of his door-wings when she laughed.

Only half watching the class attempt to trade off kicks, Rook gave the younger mech another smirk before walking off to watch the spars of the non-paying bots of her dojo. "A merchant to the bitter end, Blue? Does your brother know you're here this cycle?"

"Oh, Smokey knows. Not too happy with it, either." Bluestreak followed the femme as she wove around the bots taking up the main floor of the nearly empty warehouse, enjoying the novel experience of being a bit more knowledgeable than the current class.

He had the opportunity to watch as Rook taught one of her higher level classes, and had been surprised to see the noticeable difference between the type of teaching the gray femme used in his usual class and that one. Rather than show the bots first and watch them try an emulate her she actually had them spar with the others for most of the class, sometimes showing them better ways to move or take down their opponents, but mostly let them figure out how to incorporate what she could teach into what they already knew.

What Rook taught wasn't Metallikato, Circuit-Su, Crystalocution, or Diffusion; she called it ' _Combatives_ '. Levels One, Two, and Three.

"He muttered something about 'bad influences' and went to go drink with his Enforcer buddies."

The SPARTAN femme smiled fondly. "Is he still irritated at me about that slip I gave him two or three megacycles ago when he was trying to, badly by the way, follow me through the entertainer's district? I'll teach him how to do it if he can keep from glaring at me about having been a thief once in my function."

Her smile broadened when all Bluestreak did was laugh. Rook shook her helm, then noted the time and sighed.

"Alright bots, we have about five breems left until I close, so start cleaning up!"

The varied bum bots and beggars broke up and headed for the wash racks the saboteur had renovated the warehouse with.

Rook herself smiled tiredly at the state her floor was in, before giving the merchant still at her side a long look. "Do you want me to walk with you to where Smokey is this cycle, or do you feel confident on your own?"

Bluestreak winced at how sarcastic the end of the femme's comment was, recalling the one cycle he insisted he was able to take care of himself. If Rook hadn't followed him anyways, he would have been mugged, or worse. "I would feel better if you came with me."

The gray femme nodded before heading for her cleaning supplies and picking up a broom. "Then you know the drill; hang around a bit until I get the floor swept, and then we'll go."

(ooo000ooo)

"Aren't you going to come in?" Bluestreak looked to a hesitating Rook. The two standing outside one of the more popular oil bars that were popular places for Enforcers to be seen off shift, and the one that Smokescreen had asked the younger Praxian to head to when he was done with his class.

The SPARTAN saboteur grimaced as she turned away, waving one hand at him over her shoulder as she started walking back to her refurbished warehouse. "I wouldn't be much fun this cycle, so I'll see you later, Blue."

The merchant blinked at her retreating back before walking in and started searching for his brother in the press of bots refueling.

The gray Praxian found Smokescreen and Blaster at a table in the back, the communications specialist's cassettes sprawled out nearby; Steeljaw and Ramhorn under the table and Eject and Rewind sharing another chair. "Sup, Blue? Where's Rook?"

"She just turned around and left once we got here." Bluestreak dragged another chair over from a nearby table and sat next to his brother. "What did you say to her, Smokey? This is the third time this megacycle she has abandoned me when you've been nearby."

"I didn't say anything I haven't before." The diversionary tactician glared at his brother, frustrated over the strange femme's actions.

Rook's usual antics, before she started to avoid him, would include spending at least a joor or two an orn irritating him to distraction somewhere, either on his patrols or when she would tag along and spend the off-cycle with the Praxian brothers at the bar. Lately, trying to find the gray femme was harder than just impossible. She had even avoided her own dojo when Smokescreen showed up one cycle, knowing she had some free time.

"Fragging _femme_."

Blaster started laughing, almost unbalancing himself from his chair. "Did you forget something? Like an anniversary or her sparking orn?"

When all Smokescreen did in response was glare at him instead of his brother, the orange and black mech tried to contain himself.

"I'm just asking, 'cause it seems like she's irritated with you 'bout something." Shrugging, the communications specialist turned his attention back to his cube of energon. "Or it could be that she really is still a thief, and has been doing something not so legal this megacycle."

A snort from under the table announced that the cassettes had been listening in. Steeljaw nudged the Praxian Enforcer's leg plating. "I'm putting credits on her being torqued."

Smokescreen gritted his dental plates at the ribbing he was getting from his friend and his cassettes. "If it just so happened to slip your processor, I'm not _dating_ Rook. I'm trying to investigate her history."

"Call it what you want, but she's still mad at you." Rapping the tips of his fingers on the table, Blaster smirked as the other Enforcer refused to comment. Sliding his attention to the younger of the Praxian brothers, he tried a different tactic. "So, Blue. How was Rook this lovely off-cycle?"

Bluestreak's door-wings were fluttering in counter point to Smokescreen's own irritated jerks.

"She seemed fine, just a little distracted." The merchant smirked at his brother's sudden interest. "I got to help her with one of her later classes, and she really does teach the bots you see in the slums. They make up her final class of the cycle."

"Yeah… donating her time to help the less fortunate, the sign of a really evil femme, Smokey." The communications specialist widened his smirk when Smokescreen only looked at him. "With all the time she puts into teaching, how do you expect her to have the energy to get up to mischief?"

(ooo000ooo)

Rook cursed quietly to herself as she ducked out of sight and activated her stealth systems, worriedly noting the drain on her already stressed systems. Her energy levels were down to sixty percent, skipping her early cycle refuel hadn't been the smartest move she made that cycle.

The small group of three bots that had been chasing her ran past her hiding spot and down the narrow alley, and she waited until she couldn't hear them anymore before carefully backtracking her route to where she had been set upon. Her so called 'informant' had set her up, and that really didn't bode well for him.

The SPARTAN femme waited until the three bots eventually wandered back, checking the nooks and crannies that they though she could fit her frame in. Eventually they gave up trying to find her and walked farther into the slums.

Barely containing an irritated rev of her engine, triggered by Spotter's patching of their behavioral habits into something translatable to Cybertronians, the femme followed them.

A bare joor of traveling, both by alt mode and in their bipedal form, and the three bots plus their tail ended up at a dilapidated old building near the very outskirts of the city. Some kind of knock and password exchange happened between her three 'attackers' and the bot stationed at the door as the saboteur found another way into the ruined structure.

Catching up to her three bots again, she silently stalked them through the halls until they entered the basement, which opened up to the underground tunnels beneath the city.

Now able to get closer without giving away her presence, the SPARTAN femme listened with half an audio receptor as the three planned out what they were going to say to the 'boss' about her escape, most of her attention was on where they were in reference to the city above.

If she hadn't been told by Warcry to look for a specific bot in the Praxian underground, she would have just said 'screw it' and gone with Bluestreak for a cube or two of high-grade. This was the last cycle she wanted to spend looking for a Decepticon by the designation of Swindle, and if she couldn't find him this off-cycle, she was going to take a break from looking.

Like she feared, the gold and purple mech she was looking for wasn't in the eventual meeting place, but her so called 'informant' was. Standing right behind the three sent to deactivate her; she dropped her stealth system and smirked wickedly at the sudden terrified expression on the four mechs' faceplates.

"Looking for me?"

The two closest to her tried to turn around, either to attack her or run she wasn't sure, but a well-timed roundhouse kick knocked both out for the cycle. She tackled the last mech sent to kill her, slamming him into the ground and rolling over his back plates and up to her pedes right in front of the last bot to the party.

"That wasn't very nice, you know." Sidestepping when the mech tried to run, she slammed her shoulder joint into the mech's chest plates and knocked him down as well. Crouching, the femme knocked her knuckle joints against the mech's helm. "That means I'm allowed to get 'not nice' myself, you know."

(ooo000ooo)

Pouting, the SPARTAN femme brushed the worst of the rust flakes and dirt off her armor before walking back to her converted warehouse.

She had already informed the SPARTAN CO that she was taking a break from looking for any Decepticons in Praxus, citing that the thieves' underground was starting to get suspicious of her as a reason and had been approved to take as much time as she needed in letting the locals settle down before trying again.

Now that she had a decent amount of free time to herself again, she wondered how Smokescreen had taken her megacycle long break from torturing him. With a grimace at the mess now coating her hands, she figured that the Enforcer had been happy that her busy schedule prevented her from seeing him for even a joor.

That thought was rather depressing, actually. Being on her own for this long, no matter how many times she and the other femmes could spare time to talk, made for a depressed Rook.

She spent the few breems she had to walk, there was no way she was going to transform with the mess in her transformation seams, thinking about her reason for being in Praxus in the first place. Wondering mostly over what the bots she had met so far would take it while trying to knock the majority of the dirt and rust out of her armor.

Frowning at the ground, she also wondered what Smokescreen and Bluestreak would think about her status as a war built bot.

It seemed like she was in the mood to depress herself that cycle.

Wrapped up in her own processor, she still heard the bots loitering near her dojo before they saw her.

"She hasn't been here for at least a joor." Cold, impersonal, and focused, she identified the bot as one of Blaster's cassettes, Steeljaw. "The last sets of tracks are of her and Bluestreak leaving almost two joors ago."

Rook came to a halt, blinking bemusedly as she listened in on her guests.

"That's funny, think she's at another bar or something?" She smirked, that was Bluestreak. "I mean, she didn't take her usual off-cycle cube this orn, she could still be out."

"I just want to know _why_ she's avoiding me." Smokescreen? The saboteur forced her vocalizer to remain silent as she activated her stealth systems again, ignoring the additional drain on her power supply to see just what the frag was going on before stepping in.

Steeljaw was prowling around the main doors of her warehouse while Bluestreak, Blaster, and Smokescreen stood around and argued. "Maybe she finally started to listen to you, Smokey, when you yelled at her that you didn't want to see her around anymore."

The orange and black mech was _smirking_ , fully enjoying the show the other Enforcer was giving.

The diversionary tactician turned to say something to his friend, paused with his mouth components still open for a moment, and then sighed as he took a seat next to the wall. "I've said that a lot of times, she never listened to me before. I didn't even think she even comprehended what I was saying, she seemed more interested in my reactions."

"Well, you tell her once or twice a cycle that you would be very happy if she stopped bothering you entirely." Bluestreak shrugged at his older brother. "I could ask her, you know. Next orn I have a class, and she's shown up to each one so far."

Keeping her distance, the Praxians wouldn't pick up on her unless she was close or they all were in an enclosed space, Rook skirted the three mechs and the cassette to the other side of the street. If she stepped in and showed herself, she didn't want the Enforcers to pick up on where she had come from.

Smokescreen huffed at the offer. "If I'm going to ask something so embarrassing, I'll do it myself."

The SPARTAN saboteur suppressed a smile from breaking out on her faceplate, even if the mech's couldn't see her. She didn't know that the Praxian Enforcer had been so attached to seeing her that her absence seemed like avoidance, but then again, maybe she had been avoiding him.

There had been no reason to use up her free time on a SPARTAN issued order; she could have broken up her investigation evenly with her personal time. Walking a bit further down the street, she intended to drop her stealth system out of the bots' line of sight.

Noting the location of Eject and Ramhorn, apparently positioned to watch for her return, she opted for another street further down and took a route back that would avoid the two cassettes. There was no reason to take it easy on them.

Calmly strolling onto her street again she noted that only Steeljaw had seen her so far. Smirking, she winked at the cassette before turning her attention to the three mechs still arguing about something.

"Well, I didn't know I was having visitors this cycle, or I would have returned sooner." Rook gave them a tired smile as they all turned to see her. "I hope you forgive me, but I'm not really prepared for any guests."

"Wow, Rook. What happened to you?" Bluestreak laughed as he walked over to the femme, examining the rusty dust that marked most of her armor. "You almost look dark red instead of gray."

"One of the bum bots asked for my help." It was true too; he just asked her last cycle. Shrugging and ignoring the faint cloud of dirt and rust that fell away from her from that action, she looked over to the two Enforcers before back to her student. "I hope you haven't been waiting long, I really didn't intend to be out so late, but it was harder to find the bot than I expected."

Making her way to the doors of her home, she gave both Smokescreen and Blaster a faintly confused look.

"Although, I do have to ask just what the Enforcers want with me at this time in the cycle. Last I checked I wasn't being accused of anything."

The Praxian Enforcer winced as he got up. "I suppose I deserve that. But really, Rook, where have you been?"

Stopping so fast that Bluestreak almost ran into her back, the saboteur glared at the Praxian mech. " _I just said_ that I was out looking for another bot. Is that a crime, Officer?"

"Not what I meant." Holding up his hands, Smokescreen frowned at the tired femme. "I just… where have you been all megacycle?"

"I've been busy." Rook gave the Praxian a frown of her own before unlocking her door. "Why?"

"Uh… well." She left the door open wide enough to allow the mechs and cassettes to follow her in, the diversionary tactician taking the opportunity to talk to her without Blaster grinning at him like the whole cycle was nothing more than a drama vid. "I wanted to know if I did something that made you decide to avoid me."

"I can't see you for longer than a breem before you accuse me of something, or make a few sarcastic comments about my past as a thief. Dose that ring a bell or two?" Ignoring the rather shocked look on the Enforcer's faceplate, Rook turned to her other guests, who had just entered themselves. "You know where everything is; make yourselves at home for a breem so I can get cleaned up."

Bluestreak waited for the femme to disappear into the ground level wash rack at the back of the dojo before patting his brother on the shoulder. "I told you that you did something."

"Damn," Blaster gave the two brothers a wry grin, "I owe Steeljaw fifty credits. She was irritated."

The communications specialist shook his helm and motioned the cassettes upstairs to where the femme actually lived.

With a last glance at his older brother, Bluestreak followed the other Enforcer up stairs. Smokescreen crossed his arms over his chest plates and waited for Rook to come out. When she finally stepped out, clean and still a bit wet, he took a few steps closer so that Blaster wouldn't be able to overhear.

"If I say I'm sorry, will you forgive me?"

"What's going to stop you from doing it again?" She shot back, stepping around the Enforcer and making for the stairs. Inwardly, she was surprised at her own irritation; normally slag like this didn't bother her.

"Bluestreak. I – please?"

Smokescreen looked about as surprised as she did at the word. After a rather awkward moment, Rook sighed.

"Fine, just… leave my history alone."

\V/

"I still don't see the problem." Shadowdancer frowned at the external comm unit's vid screen that displayed the image of Rook in her berth room in Praxus. "So you're irritated at him and he's being extra nice to keep you from yelling at him again, what's so disturbing about that?"

"Uh, the small fact that SPARTANs are expected to ignore personal irritations?" The gray painted femme had a frown on her own faceplate, slumped in a sitting position on her berth and fiddling with something the XO couldn't see. "I mean, I've never cared what anyone, bot or otherwise, thought of me before. Why is it so slagging important now?"

The Praxian femme surprised the other SPARTAN with a laugh.

"Rook, if you think about it we've lived a mostly nomadic type of life until we got here. I don't think I've ever spent more than two or three human months on the same planet before, and I highly doubt that you have ever spent the same amount of time in any one assignment either. The longest any of us ever remained with the same unit was probably around a similar time frame, excluding our CO. You've just never had an acquaintance for this long, never mind one so… rude, and I'm sure some bot that gets on your case about the same thing orn in and out will eventually get on even my last nerve cluster as well."

When the saboteur managed a small smile, the tactician decided that she had spent enough time gossiping with the other femme.

"Don't worry so much, that's my job. Just let him do whatever he wants, ignore the rest. Now, I've got to go. Was that all you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Yeah, err… thanks, Shadow'." Rook gave her superior officer a small smile as she reached out to terminate her end of the comm, only to hesitate as something off about the Praxian's movements occurred to her. "Just… what are you doing that's got you so tense? I can see your door-wings twitching like a metronome from here."

"That's none of your business." With a grimace, the Praxian femme got up from in front of her own personal comm unit and reached for the terminate switch. "Goodbye, Rook."

The saboteur's laughter was cut off by the end of the comm and the tactician stalled briefly as she considered the advice she had given the other femme. Worrying was her job, but it seemed like Rook was just as good as she was.

Friends weren't a foreign concept to the SPARTANs, not a very well used concept but at least they once had a few here and there. Those tended to be mostly with other soldiers and military personnel or their own handlers. Granted, none of the 'friends' had ever been based on long term familiarity, but they were preferred to anything impersonal like most SPARTANs were used to.

Here on Cybertron, the SPARTANs had a good chance that they would have _vorns_ of time to get used to the idea that the friends they made over the previous orns would still be there and a friend next cycle. Family was considered to be mostly each other, the lack of any prior experience in personal relations stronger than familiarity usually kept anything from getting strange or weird in the ranks.

Back in the Milky Way Galaxy, the UNSC and ONI usually kept up with the SPARTANs and prevented any long term relations from occurring, but Shadowdancer couldn't see a reason to shuffle the SPARTANs around the cities to prevent any relationships from happening with the civilian bots.

A SPARTAN's loyalties had never been tested against a strong friendship before, and the XO didn't want to be the first to try.

Glaring at her floor, the Praxian femme gave a frustrated grind of her gears. She couldn't see a way to order the others to avoid making friends or starting long term relations, and the usual results of being close to another sentient individual would cause some havoc in the ranks eventually.

Turning around, the tactician made for her door, still trying to puzzle out an acceptable way to avoid the upcoming, and soon to be processor blowing, problem.

Shadowdancer lived on the top floor of a recently renovated building, with about six other bots in residence as well ranging from the first level to the third. She had pooled her accumulated credits from gladiator fighting and bought the building rather cheaply.

The process of hiring construction bots to restore the building to meet Gygax's living unit code had still been a mere drop in the bucket after that.

Now that the Praxian was a landlord, she had no need to fight in the Gygax gladiator rings but she still did on occasion for Dreadnought since the mech had been nice and let her fight in his ring when she had arrived in the city. The amount of credits paid by her tenants and the credits she acquired in the rings meant that she was rather well off financially, and that freed up more of her free time for her own reasons for being in Gygax.

Checking the time, the Praxian flicked her door-wings in irritation at the final comments of the saboteur. Rook was half right, she _was_ tense about something, but the XO had more self-control than to let some physical twitch give her away.

Taking an abrupt detour, she headed off to the warehouse section of the city, next to the slums. Carefully picking her way past the odd bot or two who was using the off-cycle to slink around unseen like her; the tactician wondered just what in the Pits she was doing.

Next to the tall wall separating the warehouses from the slum district and three warehouses in from the main road, lived a very small bot, one way too tiny to be a mini-con. Shadowdancer had come across him last megacycle, and after she looked what he was up on the Cybertronian data net, she spent a near breem standing there in shock just watching the sparkling wander around the temporary home he had claimed.

Every cycle since then she had retraced her steps to check up on him, using some of her more dubious Covert Operations skills to leave a cube of sparkling grade energon within his sight.

She had also searched around the area for any clues about why such a tiny bot had taken up residence in the back streets but had to eventually admit defeat on trying to locate where the sparkling had come from. Even if she hadn't been a Cybertronian originally, she figured that finding it meant that she had to at least give the bit of metal and wires some help until he decided on what to do about the new situation.

Other than that, the tactician had no idea about what to do about these circumstances.

Taking care of a Cybertronian sparkling couldn't be that hard, the data net information about caring for such a bot looked nowhere near as hard as some of the missions she had carried out as a SPARTAN, but she didn't have the time to do so and still keep up with her research into the Decepticons. Leaving the bot there was just as distasteful as the thought of having to abandon the tiny thing in an emergency situation.

Torn between wanting to leave the sparkling where he was and hoping that some bot eventually would retrieve him and taking the tiny bot with her and damning the consequences, Shadowdancer carefully stalked around to the back alleys to check up on the sparkling again.

The closer she got to the area she had left the sparkling in, the tenser she became. Shadowdancer could hear voices, discussing something very near the little bot's crate/home. Taking a sudden leap up a pile of empty crates the Praxian femme took an alternate route, one that would lead her over the warehouse roofs and provide her with an overview of what was going on.

"I don't care; I want the little waste of metal gone." The raised vocalizer was a slight tweak away from being squeaky, but still recognizable as a femme's. Sneaking to the very edge of the warehouse roof she was on, the tactician peered over to watch two bots, a femme, and a mech, talking over the little sparkling's helm. "It's bad for business to have it loitering here. Dump it somewhere else, or something."

The mech turned to look at his counterpart with a raised optic ridge. "And just what am I to do with him after that? If the Enforcers catch me with a sparkling that's not registered with me, I'll have to worry about getting sent to Polyhex. I ain't going through that for you, even if I do owe you credits."

Throwing up her hands, the femme turned around and stormed off. "Then kill it. Once again, I don't care, just get rid of it."

She passed under the portion of the roof that Shadowdancer was spying from, letting the SPARTAN get a good look at her and the red optics she wore as a Decepticon supporter.

"Sorry, bitlit." Snatching up the little bot, who had started to click in distress at the rough handling, the mech started off down the road. "But you heard that glitch of a femme."

Shadowdancer had heard enough to know she would not like what the mech was planning. A few moments of processing, and she resigned herself to taking in the tiny bot until further notice.

Silently stalking the two, she waited until the larger mech had taken a turn down another road, one that had a few conveniently broken light fixtures. The mech never saw the Covenant Sword that sliced through his neck cables, nor did he feel it when some bot tugged the little sparkling out of his hand.

Shadowdancer peered a bit bemusedly into gray optics, the sparkling started clicking and twittering at her in surprised curiosity. Raising the small bundle of metal and wires a bit higher to a light source a bit further away, the sparkling twisted around to lay flat in her clawed hands and squeak and click at her in what the tactician thought was disapproval.

With a snort of wry amusement that startled the tiny bot into silence, Shadowdancer tucked the sparkling against her chest armor and started for the nearest Enforcer Station. "Registered, hmm? I bet that means your creators are listed _somewhere_. Let's see if I can find them."

\V/

The sparkling did not like the Enforcer on desk duty at the Station. He chittered angrily at the Enforcer femme, who was painted silver and black with helicopter rotary blades extending from her back, from where he had strategically retreated under a few chairs.

Shadowdancer was amused enough to start laughing at the embarrassed apology that the Enforcer tried to ply her with while trying to get the orphaned sparkling out from under the bolted down chair. The commotion alerted the Enforcer Station Chief that something was going on, and the mech was hard pressed to keep from laughing himself at the sight. "Care to tell me what you're doing down there, Zephyr?"

The Enforcer femme banged her helm on the underside of the chair as she tried to straighten up, sending the SPARTAN-Bot XO into another round of laughter. "I'm sorry about the noise, sir. But this femme brought in an apparently abandoned sparkling, and he decided he didn't like me and squirmed out of my grasp."

Rubbing at the back of her helm, Zephyr frowned at the noticeably louder chatter coming from under the chair, broadcasting the sparkling's vast disapproval of his current circumstances.

"I don't understand why, he was perfectly content in Shadowdancer's servos and she even has claws sharp enough for a bad horror vid."

Giving the strange blue and black Praxian still snickering at the misfortune of his subordinate a searching look, she raised her hands up so her claws caught the dim lights, the older Enforcer mech rubbed the bottom of his jaw plate and processed why that would be. "His original creators might have had claws as well, why not let this… Shadowdancer try getting him?"

The soft snickering stopped abruptly and the look the Praxian gave him was contemplating. After a moment, the femme shrugged and shooed the Enforcer femme out of the way.

Kneeling down to her knee joints, Shadowdancer peered under the chair, only to be knocked back to her aft as the sparkling abandoned his position and all but squirmed to try and get behind her chest plates. He twittered in relief, before clicking angrily over her apparent abandonment of him.

With a confused twitch to her door-wings, the Praxian looked back at the other Enforcer femme. "I thought you said I had a little more time."

Zephyr just shrugged a little helplessly at her. "The process differs from one sparkling to the next. Since you admit to finding him about a joor ago, it is conceivable he now thinks you're his carrier. The process of a sparkling's imprinting on another adult framed bot takes anywhere from a breem to a cycle, he could just be a little fast on the uptake, classic signs of an above average processor."

"Wouldn't that also mean that his original creators are deactivated?" Frowning at the bundle of wires and metal clicking to her as he explored the front of her chassis, the tactician carefully got back up to her pedes and turned to the two Enforcers. "That… I… um, I have no idea what to do with a sparkling."

"You'll learn pretty fast, there are files available in the medic's stations that will cover most things. As for the creators of the little mech," Zephyr carefully approached the sparkling, keeping herself out of his line of sight. Pulling a small device out of her subspace, the Enforcer femme plugged it into the back of the small bot's neck, ignoring his squeak of protest, and hummed as the device beeped at her, "they are deactivated. We have reports for the both of them. The creator, a mech named Granite, was deactivated in an arena gladiator fight, the carrier, a femme called Silverbell, was recently offlined from a rust infection that had been let go for too long."

Both Enforcers tactfully ignored the Praxian's wince when she heard the creator's method of deactivation, figuring she had either lost a friend to a gladiator fight or knew of some bot that had gone to one.

Zephyr carefully retrieved the plug from the back of the sparkling's neck column. "Are you going to take him, or do we have to send him to the medics as an orphaned bot?"

"I wasn't aware I have a choice in the matter." Shadowdancer carefully rearranged the sparkling's grip on her, tugging the tiny hand off a sensitive group of wires and onto her armor plates. "I… might as well, I suppose. I could always ask for my cohort's help until his first upgrade."

Frowning at the ridiculously happy expression on the other femme's faceplate, the Praxian raised an optic ridge at the so far silent mech.

"I'm getting in over my helm, aren't I?"

With a broad grin, the Enforcer Station Chief simply walked over to the terminal and pulled up the adoption program. "He needs a designation; one wasn't registered at the time of his sparking."

Shifting her gaze from the older Enforcer mech to the mechling in her arms, Shadowdancer gave a resigned huff. "…Kynaite."

The Enforcer mech gave the Praxian femme a grin. "Alright then, I just need your digital signature on these two forms, then you got to take… Kynaite to the medics and register him there as your sparkling.

\V/

Two joors later Shadowdancer took Kynaite to her home, quietly thanking Zephyr for the escort.

The little bitlit was blinking slowly at the two femmes; something the medics assured her was only a sign of fatigue and nothing else. It would all fixed by a good five joors of recharge and a cube of sparkling grade energon when he onlined next cycle.

All in all, the medics were impressed that Kynaite was so healthy for a once abandoned sparkling. His systems showed little neglect and a few were even more advanced than the normal systems sparkling frames were built with. The medics had given her three massive files to download, two of them dealt with the health and maintenance of sparklings in general and the last one was on common afflictions that could plague young Cybertronians.

One of the medics even gave her the frequency of the medical station, citing that any questions would be answered so she shouldn't feel that calling them about anything that worried her would be a problem for them. Zephyr had voluntarily escorted the SPARTAN tactician and the sparkling to the medics, and had almost broken out laughing at the briefly panicked look on the other femme's faceplate when she was complimented on having the steel in her struts to adopt a sparkling of bots she didn't know.

The Enforcer femme smiled, waving to Kynaite nestled in the Praxian's arms.

"Not a problem. It was nice meeting you, Shadowdancer." When she hesitated, the tactician gave the other femme a curious look. "I know you said some of your cohort would come out and help, but if you ever need a sparkling sitter, I wouldn't mind helping you out."

Zephyr smirked at the suddenly wary look on the sparkling's faceplate.

"As long as I'm off shift for the cycle, that is."

"I… thank you. I'll keep that in my CPU." When the Enforcer turned around to leave, Shadowdancer hesitated before calling out again. "I would need some help, getting things for Kynaite."

Zephyr spun around and hugged the other femme, ignoring how the Praxian suddenly stiffened. "I'll be here as soon as I can. I get off the tenth joor of next cycle!"

Staring off after the flyer, the SPARTAN tactician gave a brief glance down to the bundle of metal and wires that seemed determined to disrupt her carefully laid out plans. With a soft chuckle, she started up the stairs to her own level of the building, silently speculating on just what a sparkling would need.

Once in her room, she set her new sparkling on the berth and watched Kynaite curl up and immediately drop into recharge without so much as a click or two of protest.

Shadowdancer sat herself on the edge of the berth, braced herself for the drain on her processor capacity and power levels, then, she activated her tactical uplink with the other SPARTANs.

\V/

All across Cybertron, once alien soldiers that had seen two galaxy spanning wars either snapped online from their recharge cycles or stopped what they were doing and concentrated when something tugged at their processors.

The faint sense of some bot reaching out alerted them that the XO had activated her tactical uplink, meaning something had happened that could change what they were doing.

{ _I apologize for the unscheduled interruption, but it seems that I… I might have a problem._ } Shadowdancer's mental tone sounded hesitant, almost as if she wasn't sure about her own statement.

Ignoring the rather boring meeting he and Galeforce had been dragged into, Warcry didn't know why he was expected to know what the scientist had dredged up about whatever they had been working on, the tank CO took up the thread of conversation as the combat engineer paid attention for the both of them. { _You don't sound all too sure of that, three-four-one_.}

On the heels of the CO, Trickflip chimed in. { _Will it get me out of Gygax? If I have to watch one-four-four tear another bot apart and laugh as does so, I'll rip him apart._ }

{ _As if you could._ } In all arrogance, Orpheus ignored the swing at his helm and simply ripped the other mech's helm off and ending the gladiator match, before stalking off to a quiet corner.

{ _What's the problem, ma'am?_ } Rook sounded as bored as the CO and the infiltrator, only half listening as Bluestreak chatted at her about what was popular for merchants to sell and what was not. { _Do you need help?_ }

{ _It seems that… I've adopted a sparkling that I found orphaned last megacycle._ } Her own bemusement over the events of the strange cycle was nothing to the reactions of her sibling SPARTANs.

Warcry almost fell out of his chair as Galeforce failed to keep his startled bark of laughter to himself; Rook spluttered into her cube of high grade in tandem with Quickgrip choking on his early cycle cube; Knightblade fumbled the slide containing some of the strange blue liquid contaminating her coolant as Clearsight caught herself before she could fall out of her berth; and Titan tightened his grasp on the bot he was apprehending hard enough that the mech started yelling about Enforcer abuse. Silentforce silently thanked whatever kept him silent just as Holdout lucked out and was able to deactivate her audio receptors before Refit could trill loud enough to break glass in excitement, with no bots nearby to see Markmaker joined Galeforce and Spotter in laughing.

The others, excluding Drax as he muttered about weird femmes just within the audio receptor range of his trine mates, remained silent, wondering just how _that_ had come to be.

{ _I, uh… I'm sorry?_ }

Warcry ignored the sudden concerns over his and Galeforce's health as he pulled himself upright in his chair and held up a hand to stall the bots trying to talk to him. { _How in the Pits did that happen?_ }

{ _Can I come and see the little bitlit? Oh, do you know how to take care of a sparkling? What did you name him, or is it her?_ } Refit trilled again as Holdout tried to keep her quiet and escort the slimmer femme into her living unit at the same time.

Rook made some reassuring noise in the gray Praxian's direction as she gave the uplink more attention. { _How did you get a sparkling? I know you just said you adopted, uh, it, but I thought sparklings were… like, zealously guarded by their creators until their first upgrade?_ }

{ _ **His**_ _have been deactivated, err… the creators, anyways. When I took him to the Enforcers after saving him from some bot that wanted to deactivate him, they told me that he had impressed, or started bonding with me, already. The medics I saw confirmed that the carrier's bond was active with me._ } Shadowdancer rubbed the side of her helm, wondering what else she was expected to report. She took a quick pic of the sparkling and sent it off to the other SPARTANs. { _Kynaite, his name, is now registered as my sparkling with the Enforcers and the medics here._ }

{ _Oh-kay… so, what?_ } Flippant attitude aside, Trickflip started to worry. His commanding officer had a Cybertronian equivalent of a kid, and no SPARTAN had ever conceived of being the sole caretaker of even a pet or drone, much less the next generation of either the human or Cybertronian race. { _I can see how that would limit you, but what else are you worried about?_ }

{ _…I need some help. Taking care of the bitlit and my half of the Decepticon investigation will slow with the extra drain on my time. Even then, I don't want to speculate about being found out with him with me._ }

{ _I volunteer!_ } Rook couldn't keep the silly grin off her faceplate as she looked over the vid of her new 'nephew', missing the alarmed look on Bluestreak's face.

{ _You're needed where you are, one-two-seven._ } Warcry scrubbed his hands over his own faceplate as he reviewed where the SPARTANs were and what they were doing, barely acknowledging Optimus Prime's concerned gaze out of the corner of his optics. { _One-nine-six, can you take some time to help out three-four-one?_ }

{ _Yes sir, on my way._ } Abandoning his table and half-finished cube of energon, Trickflip darted out the door of the rickety establishment and transformed into his altmode for the trip from Polyhex to Gygax, pulling up the mental map of the underground tunnels under the main Decepticon city.

{ _That's only a temporary fix, sir. From the medic's report, the bitlit is only about a decacycle old, and the final upgrade is only done near the end of the third vorn of function._ } Shadowdancer gave a soft sound of frustration, rubbing the back plates of the sparkling when Kynaite clicked sleepily as her agitation leaked through the tentative bond she had with him. { _I could come back early or hire a caretaker part time, but I would need a reason to do so. As a landlord, there isn't much demand on my time._ }

{ _Find a way, if you can't by the time we pull three-three-seven out and send in one-nine-six into Kaon, then I will think about pulling you out as well. Zero-four-six out._ } Warcry shook his helm as the furthest parts of the link faded from his processor, namely his and Galeforce's part, giving him enough attention to spare and realize that Ratchet had entered the meeting room at some point and was now glaring at the two SPARTAN mechs with his hands on his hip joints and tapping a pede rather impatiently. "Err… sorry about that?"

{ _Okay… I'll admit I'm kinda jealous, but that explains why you were so distracted when I talked to you earlier._ } Even with that as a parting shot, Rook still sounded fond as she saved the vid of a recharging Kynaite in her processor and turned to reassure Bluestreak that she was not malfunctioning, she just got some great news from her cohort 'sister'.

Knightblade hesitated before setting down the slide she had nearly dropped and giving the two older mechs watching her with concern a reassuring smile. { _I agree with one-two-seven, you just have all the luck. I'm also warning you that I'm going to show him off every opportunity I get._ }

Snorting as she finally got the ex-AI in their living unit, Holdout shook her helm in fond amusement over her fellow femmes. { _I wonder how he's going to turn out, with a SPARTAN for his carrier. You got to admit, that the idea of the next generation being raised by our Head of Covert Operations isn't a very reassuring thought._ }

One by one, the other SPARTANs let go of their portion of the tactical uplink to give the tactician some relief, wondering what being a 'aunt' or 'uncle' would require of them in the vorns to come and how the XO planned to protect the new littlest member of their extended 'family'.

\V/

The Enforcer Chief of the city of Kaon gave the metallic red and black mech with a strange symbol painted on his left arm standing in his office a beseeching look.

"We don't really expect much trouble, you and you're skills are just a precaution." When the mech didn't so much as twitch at the flattery, the Enforcer tried another tactic. "Some of the bots you've worked for before will also be there as well. With the unrest as it stands, they requested your presence as a requisite for their own participation."

The mech stood there, simply perusing the data pad on the event and letting the Enforcer wonder about some of the rumors abounding about him. After about a breem of uncomfortable silence, the bodyguard that had come so recommended by several high positioned bots in the Kaon city council finally nodded his acceptance of the job, and tossed the data pad onto the Enforcer's desk.

"Wonderful, you'll need to be there about a joor before the reception starts, so… hey, wait!"

Silentforce ignored the highly paid and mostly under worked 'civil servant' and showed himself out of the Enforcer's Station in the heart of Kaon, lip plates compressed into a thin line. If it hadn't been for the directives handed down by Warcry about cooperating with the Enforcers in the cities the SPARTANs were assigned to, the SPARTAN mech never would have considered attending such a mockery of an event he held in some fondness from his time as a human SPARTAN.

Sentinel Prime was scheduled to arrive in Kaon for his once a vorn inspection of each Autobot held city in a megacycle. The rather corrupt Governing Council of Kaon was tripping over themselves in trying to clean up, or at least cover up, much of the unrest in the city.

The current actions of the bots in control of the city were in direct conflict of what the defensive specialist remembered about the inspections he had been a part of. When the UNSC held inspections, it was more about uncovering problems than covering said problems up. Then again, problems in the military generally led to preventable death. Problems in the civilian sector led to some bot getting reassigned to a less generous job.

Walking down one of the main roads through Kaon proper, Silentforce could see other Enforcers trying to corral the unwilling populace in leaving their demonstrations and return to their usual functions.

The farther he walked the more damage from Decepticon rallies he could see. Some number of construction bots, undoubtedly hired to clean up the main streets for the Prime's once a vorn visit, were trying to also circumvent the protesters against the Autobots, the City Council, and the current state of affairs.

Taking a quick detour prevented him from being caught up in one such protest, this one about a rally for Decepticon support in trade.

Completely quitting the Government section, the SPARTAN mech eventually found himself in the guild building for the Stonewall Defenders. Nodding to the door guard, Silentforce let himself in.

The main floor, the only one those outside the guild ever saw, was mostly for demonstration of a particular patron or hopeful. There was always some bot wanting to join the guild, they tried out for an open position by either getting a recommendation from a bot already in the guild or by testing themselves in spars with the bot on duty.

The current orn saw a femme by the designation Chromia at the main desk, the blue and silver femme merely waving a little tiredly at the SPARTAN. "What did they want, 'force?"

Well used to the mech's inability to speak, she didn't even flinch when he responded over the public comms.

: _I'm to attend the reception of Sentinel Prime, and shadow him during his inspection._ : The red and black mech frowned at her soft snicker. : _I fail to see what is so funny._ :

"You're becoming very popular lately. You're even getting requests from outside the guild. Pretty soon, you won't even need to come back; you'll get accosted outside for jobs." Chromia smirked at the stoic mech's huff of irritation. "Not quite what you were going for when you joined, right?"

: _Doing one's job well is supposed to be reward enough, why are they bothering me with the rest of this… simplistic slag?_ : Silentforce kicked softly at the desk separating him and the femme, running his processor though his experiences as a human SPARTAN and wondering why he was getting preferential treatment _now_ , instead of when he was tasked to do a job five times harder.

The weapons expert burst out laughing at the frustrated tone.

"You say that like it's a bad thing. Sometimes I wonder where the Pits you picked that attitude up from." Chromia flicked her fingers at the mech's expression of distaste. "I know, I know, you're a prior military bot. One of these orns, I'm going to pour enough high-grade down your intakes and get you to spill exactly what unit you came out of. I'm starting to wonder if this unit of straight laced warriors even exists."

: _You can try. Is Steelbrace in his office?_ :

"Yep, and waiting for you. Figured he deserved a helms up about you getting called personally to the Enforcers." Waving a hand to indicate the stairs behind her, the femme braced her other arm on the desk as something behind the mech caught her attention. "Hey, hey _you!_ Yeah, I see you, numb nuts. Hold that rifle like that again, and I'll shove the fragging thing up your aft till you can _spit your weapon's fire!_ "

Leaving the weapons expert to her job the SPARTAN bolted up the stairs, not wanting to get caught in one of Chromia's lectures about weapon's safety and those 'Pit-slagged junkyard rejects' that failed to follow it.

Third floor held the offices of the guild, mainly the Guild Master for the Stonewall Defenders, the Guild's head accountant, and the mech in charge of personnel assignments, who Silentforce had to meet with about the Enforcer's request.

Living up to his designation, the SPARTAN snuck up on Steelbrace.

Painted gray with silver peeking out of the spots his paint had been scrapped off of, the mech had some height and width on the SPARTAN mech, but not the reach. Steelbrace had short, stubby arms intended for bracing and moving heavy things, a function that had seen just as much use as when the mech had originally been a part of a construction guild.

Steelbrace was only sent out on guild jobs when the situation had a possibility of turning ugly and would need a bot to barricade a corridor or two. The mech spent the times between such jobs arranging the schedules of the guild members, ensuring that if a patron requested a particular bot on one or two occasions that they would be free of their current jobs, or had another guild bot take their place.

The former construction mech shot the silent bot a quick look, only to look back up and set his work down as the identity of his visitor registered. "You're back, I see. Let me guess, you won't be available for that noble's party being held the same orn as the Prime's visit."

: _I have been requested to attend the reception, but there was no mention of how long I have to be present for._ : Silentforce set himself down on one of the chairs opposite of the mech and pulled out another data pad that contained his own schedule from the case next to the wall. : _There is no reason that I could not attend both._ :

"That would set you on another double shift that cycle." Snatching the pad out of the SPARTAN's grip, Steelbrace reviewed the information himself. "And you know ignoring the conversations the Enforcers try to hold with you isn't the best way to manage your guild priorities against possible patrons."

Looking over the prior and completed jobs the red and black mech had, the larger mech let out a laugh.

"You know, I was wondering what was going through your processor when you joined us. If we actually had to pay you like we do the other guild bots, you would bankrupt us in a decacycle."

: _I said I only needed a place to recharge and enough credits for fuel, anymore and I would have no use for it._ : Silentforce shifted a bit uncomfortably, then shrugged at the odd look the other mech pinned him with. : _You helped me out with my cohort sister's tuition fees, that's enough for me._ :

"That's a mere pittance compared to the figures Lithium gave us last cycle." Steelbrace smirked at the now fidgeting mech sitting in his office. "She went over your entire guild record and compared it to the finances we have now, and shocked me and poor Stonewall with it during our last off-cycle. You should have seen old Stone face's faceplate."

Silentforce shrugged, then snagged his schedule out of the other mech's hand.

: _Sorry? I'll try to do bad on my next assignment._ : Leaning out of Steelbrace's reach, the SPARTAN mech slotted in his new job with the two he had already been requested for. : _As long as nothing goes wrong, I should still be able to show up for both jobs. Tell Lit' that she should stop worrying, I asked for that clause in my contract for this reason. I have no use for more credits that what you already pay me._ :


	10. Chapter 10

Silentforce could admit Sentinel Prime's detachment of bodyguards and keepers made for an impressive show when the older Prime finally showed in Kaon's streets.

Picking out Ultra Magnus' alt form from the sheer clutter of attendants and guards, the defensive specialist positioned himself so the massive military mech could catch sight of him. When Sentinel Prime and his miniature legion of attendances made their formal speeches and the City Council made their own lengthy speeches, the metallic red and black mech moved just far enough to the outside of the gathering currently happening on the steps of the Government District's main office so Ultra Magnus wouldn't have to move too much farther away from his charge. : _Shiny._ :

Biting back a snort, the Military Commander of the Autobots gave the SPARTAN a dry look as he responded the same way. : _You wouldn't think so if you got tortured with trying to talk to them every orn._ :

Silentforce just shrugged, not really sure if he should respond to that statement or not. : _Kaon's in a bit of unrest at the moment, with the Decepticons gaining more and more support in the working class. The Enforcers had to forcibly clear the streets last orn. Was his visit here really necessary? It would be sparkling's play for some bot to engineer an ambush or something similar to off-line him._ :

: _It's more of a show of cohesion than any inspection, not that Kaon ever had to suffer through anything like an inspection before._ : When the red and black mech raised an optic ridge, Magnus grimaced and wondered if the circumstances around Sentinel Prime's elevation to the position of a Prime would make sense to the solely military trained individual next to him. : _Before Sentinel was a Prime, the Council of Ancients was based out of Kaon. The Prime before Sentinel was a military leader like me, except he was in power in a time of peace. The previous Prime couldn't accept the changing roles of Cybertron in the ending orns of the Golden Age, and he took off for somewhere where he didn't have to deal with politicians and politics anymore, and most of Cybertron didn't blame him because of how he was treated by the new ruling powers, like a malfunctioning relic of an obsolete age. Sentinel became a Prime because there was a prevalent fear that not having a Prime would cause the working class bots to resent the Council that made the policies that Cybertron was following. He was originally one of the Council of Ancients, and attained the role of Prime because he could navigate a council room without trampling all over the methods of other council members._ _Kaon, as the original home of the Council of Ancients, used the time between Sentinel's reformat into a Prime as a buffer to prevent the new Prime from overriding many of their self-serving policies by burring their work in miles of double talk and treaties. Inspections in Kaon are mostly the old council members trying to squirm out of whatever trouble they are in, and the newer members try to suck up to the Prime in order to have their own mistakes overlooked._ :

To the Autobot's surprise, the SPARTAN nodded in understanding.

: _Sentinel isn't a bad mech, just a bit bitter about having to cut and saw his way through the work of previous bots trying to keep him from his role as a Prime._ :

They both watched the drama being played out in the streets for a little while longer. Before long, a blue and silver femme showed up and waved to catch Silentforce's attention.

"Yo, if you wanna attend that party you got requested for, we need to leave now." Chromia sauntered a bit closer, only to stop and stare when she finally noticed the company her quiet friend was keeping. "Care to introduce me to your friend there?"

: _Chromia, this is Ultra Magnus, the Military Commander for the Autobots. Magnus, this is Chromia, a femme that works for the same guild I do._ :

The massive red and blue mech sketched a bow to the femme as she stared some more. "I should probably get back to Sentinel, now that the greetings and such are done. Chromia, it is nice to meet you. I'll see you later Silentforce."

With one last wave to the stoic mech, Magnus left the two to search out his charge.

Chromia blinked after the Autobot, before pinning a hard look to her fellow guild bot. "You and me really need to talk one of these orns."

\V/

Starscream gritted his dental plates as he followed along in Sentinel Prime's wake. If it hadn't been for Thunderstrike's calm presence between him and the red mech, the ex-scientist would have already jumped the Prime and torn his helm off.

It was _his_ fault, after all, that Starscream couldn't send out a rescue team for his deep space mission partner after an ice storm on an alien planet caused Skyfire to shut down in emergency stasis. Cloudwalker, who was the last remaining member of the trine that the ex-scientist had been shoved into once when he finally returned to Cybertron, had his own reasons for being a part of the trine.

Fifteen vorns ago, when Starscream had returned with his request for aid, Sentinel Prime flat refused right to his faceplate while citing that there were more important issues and shoved the seeker into the Aero Space Division without the possibility of delay. Causing the limited window of recovery for his mission partner to dwindle to nothing.

It grated against the ex-scientist's protocols to allow such an ignoble deactivation to one as close as trine, Skyfire might have been bigger than Starscream but both had a healthy amount of respect for each other's processors. Thunderstrike had already been a part of the older Prime's security detail, and had cultivated both Starscream and Cloudwalker as viable replacements for his recently deactivated trine mates.

It wasn't until nearly five vorns later that the trine leader divulged the reasons his trine had been deactivated. Thunderstrike had turned Decepticon, without bearing the faction insignia or the red optics of a supporter. His last trine objected, and he deactivated them in a training exercise.

Ten vorns ago, he extended an offer to his new trine mates to deactivate Sentinel Prime from within, then abscond with the Aero Space Division to the Decepticons. Both had agreed for different reasons.

Despite his impatience to get on with the reason the three seekers had spent the last ten vorns trying to accomplish, Starscream and Cloudwalker plodded along on the ground like the other ground bound bots, occasionally glaring at the back of Sentinel Prime. Since Sentinel was in front of Thunderstrike, it looked more like the trine had an internal issue rather than an issue against the mech they were responsible to guard.

Even if he was a part of the trine at the moment, Starscream had no intentions of letting Thunderstrike take control of the soon to be _Decepticon_ Aero Space Division. A trine leader that could deactivate his own trine mates was a seeker that was badly broken in his trine protocols, and a very bad candidate for leadership.

The crafty ex-scientist was planning and plotting on how to get his trine leader deactivated by the Autobots without it looking like he had his finger joints all over the deactivation. He had already approached a few Decepticons in supporting his bid for the rank of Supreme Air Commander, and was maneuvering a few other useful ground bound pawns in the directions he wanted.

The planning of ten vorns were about to pay off, all of the indignities that the seekers had suffered at the hands of the Autobots' Prime was about to be repaid. The Decepticons had promised a distraction of a sizable force to attack Kaon in the middle of the cycle, and the seeker detachment would 'escort' the Prime out of the city and deactivate him.

The only loose end Starscream could see was the continuing function of his so called trine leader.

\V/

It was the sirens that tipped Silentforce off. While carefully checking out the guest list for another Noble's Creation Orn, the red and black mech's audios caught the sound of one of the city's invasion alarms starting up, only to go silent nearly as soon as the first ringing squeal started.

Blinking as he ripped his optics from the suspicious actions of one of the guests that didn't appear on the guest list to search the skyline for any telltale signs that something was going wrong.

He spotted it on the very southwestern side of the city. A plume of smoke curled up from one of the city's watchtowers, positioned on the very outer walls of the city. A quick comm sent to one of his fellow guild bots nearby that location sent the defensive specialist running for the Government District, throwing the suspicious individual into the arms of the Enforcers stationed around the Noble's compound before he left.

Drax had been happy to hear he was needed from the other SPARTAN mech, but he and his trine would take a joor at the latest to reach Kaon so Silentforce would have to contain whatever was going wrong until he got the seeker back up. Warcry had been less amused to hear from him, citing that the Autobots didn't have any resources nearby and Optimus was mobilizing as fast as he could, but they would take five joors at the earliest to reach Kaon.

Racing down the streets, the defensive specialist ignored the ripples of unease that ran through the usual traffic clogging the streets, processor locked on the one positive reason for the Decepticons to attack Kaon on that particular cycle.

Swerving around an Enforcer check point, Silentforce sent a quick apology over the comms to Steelbrace for the Enforcers and sent what little he knew already to Stonewall with another apology about the Nobles about to beat on his door about the anti-social behavior of one of his guild bots. Quickly transforming to his bipedal mode, the SPARTAN mech bolted past the Enforcers alerted to his presence and the occasional bot that tried to stop him.

Skidding into a council room, Silentforce again ignored the demands for him to stop and made directly for Ultra Magnus, taking the larger mech's arm and leading him to a window to point out what he had already noticed. As the two mechs quietly conversed over the public comms, Sentinel and the others were left wondering what the Pits had just gone on.

Finally, Magnus pulled himself away from the window to look over the bots now crowding around in the room.

"Kaon is under attack, stay here until the fighting is done." Raising his vocalizer to be heard over the sudden clamor, the larger military mech beckoned for the law enforcement personnel that had tried to follow the SPARTAN. "Enforcers, come with me. We need to prevent them from breaching the walls."

"But sir, what about-?" One of the senators' aids, a mech by the name Inkblot if Magnus could recall correctly, pointed at the metallic red and black mech that had so rudely barged into a meeting.

"He's your best bet for survival. Silentforce, stay with Sentinel Prime." Without another backwards glance, the Autobot military commander left to full fill his function.

Silentforce raised an optic ridge at the suddenly nervous bots in the room, he had never been in a situation with so many that couldn't defend themselves before. Quickly casting a rather despairing look around, he noticed the three seekers that surrounded Sentinel Prime and nodded approvingly. At least he wasn't solely responsible for all of them.

Thunderstrike regarded the ground bound mech thoughtfully as his younger trine mates wondered over his function. Ultra Magnus listened to the mech, Sentinel Prime wasn't insulted that his safety had been passed to the mech, and the mech was currently looking around at both the construction of the building and the bots he had been entrusted with.

He could be a problem.

"We should move; this building is just a beacon that calls to the Decepticons to attack. Where else could we stash the most important bots to Kaon?"

Silentforce hesitated, torn between agreeing and following his orders to the very letter, but Sentinel nodded in agreement with the leader of his seeker guard detachment. "There is a suitable building not too far from here. We could keep watch over this building from the second floor as well as remain out of any fighting."

Cloudwalker gave a low turbine rev in disgust. Most of the ground bound bots dismissed the sound, but the metallic red and black mech look over in confusion, correctly identifying the sound and wondering about the reason why. Sternly reprimanding his trine mate for showing his dislike of the Prime in front of a bot that could understand seekers, Thunderstrike pretended to listen to Sentinel as the red mech laid out a plan to move the numerous bots that occupied the main Council Building to a compound held by a fellow noble.

After a few tense moments of being inspected by the strange mech, he eventually turned away to organize whatever Sentinel had asked of him, letting the three seeker builds feel a few moments of relief.

Thunderstrike just nodded to whatever the Prime was saying to him, knowing full well that most of the bots in the room would fail to reach the compound. As planned, the fight outside of Kaon would only have occurred after a large group of Decepticons had already gotten in position to intercept the Prime when he left the building.

Without Ultra Magnus around, the only other competent fighters would have been the seeker trine. The odd metallic red and black mech was unexpected, but none of the seekers considered him to be much of a viable threat.

\V/

Silentforce suggested sending some bot out to scout the Prime's route through the Prime, for some reason unknown to most in the room the mech refused to talk using his vocalizer. Sentinel agreed that it was a good idea and Cloudwalker volunteered, knowing full well where the Decepticons were positioned and he left with the intentions of instructing the deactivation of the odd red and black mech before he could interfere with the plan any further.

If Starscream and Thunderstrike hadn't been planning to deactivate the Prime and all of the witnesses, they would have spared a few thoughts for trying to get the mech to change sides to Decepticon, as it was; they were starting to get irritated at the competence of the mech.

Once they left the protection of the buildings Silentforce, with Sentinel acting as a go between, had ordered all of the bots that couldn't fight to one side of the street in a column of twos. Skirting the high walls of the main Council Building, that meant the non-fighters were protected on one side by a thick wall and the others that had some combat skills stuck to the open side.

Including arranging the bots in a defensible position for the march, the mech had also called up his guild, requesting for help. There were now six bots that specialized in defense, all part of a mech named Stonewall's protection guild, helping the two remaining seekers and Silentforce in protecting the Prime.

If he hadn't ensured there would be more Decepticons than was truly needed, Thunderstrike would have started to worry about his plan to deactivate the Prime. The extra fighters from a protection guild was worrying enough, but the mech that had tipped Ultra Magnus off to the attack early was an unknown quantity he wasn't sure about. He only had another few streets to worry about it, as the location of the ambush was fast approaching.

The first shot took every bot by surprise even as it clipped a mech in the leg. Even Silentforce froze for a brief moment before shoving Sentinel Prime back into the wall and giving the seekers a brief irritated look. Thunderstrike, without wondering how the mech knew so much about seeker trines, pointed a little further off to the left as the location of Cloudwalker.

As two other guild bots dragged their fellow out of the street, the red and black mech pressed his lip plates together, nodded to a femme that hadn't let up nagging at him about how he knew the Autobots until the shot sounded, and slunk off further down the street to see what was going on.

Chromia smiled apologetically at the Prime.

"He's a bit… weird. Good mech, though." She crouched down next to him as Sentinel sat up from where he had been shoved, setting his back plates against the wall. "So… how _do_ you know him?"

Any reply was cut off by the report of another shot, and then a few more rang out nearly on the heels of the first. Tensing for a fight, the guild bots backed the non-fighters and their wounded fellow into a blind alley as they took positions to cover the same direction the red and black mech had traveled down.

Thunderstrike exchanged an uneasy look with Starscream. Without the Decepticons as back up, the seekers had no way of ensuring their continued function after off lining the Prime. As the commotion further down the streets started to get louder, more and more of the guild bots started to arm themselves with either whatever was handy or with the weapons they had concealed in their subspace.

Cloudwalker appeared running down the street, skidding to a halt in front of the first of the guild bots. "That mech, the red and black one, needs backup."

Without another word, four of the six bots took off to assist Silentforce, leaving Chromia and the injured guild bot behind with the three seekers, Sentinel Prime, and the rest of the government bots. Thunderstrike gave his trine mate an approving nod, well pleased with the new turn of events.

Chromia smirked at the confused expression on some of the civilian bots before turning her attention back to clamping leaking lines in her guild mate's leg. She didn't think much of Thunderstrike getting closer to her while she attended the injury, and missed the swing that knocked her offline.

The injured mech tried to retaliate, but Starscream shot the mech through the spark chamber before he could struggle to his pedes.

The trine leader turned to the shocked Prime. "We need to have a few words, Sentinel _Prime_."

\V/

To say that Silentforce was confused when he spotted Cloudwalker with the Decepticons would be a lie. He recognized the seeker, considered the implications for a moment, then realized that the seekers had betrayed the Autobots and tried to return to Sentinel Prime's side only to be pinned in place when the Decepticons attacked him at the traitorous seeker's direction.

He was sheltering behind a corner of a building, wincing at the close shots that sprayed melted metal across his frame. Violently cursing over his comms, he let Drax and Warcry know the change in circumstances and the SPARTAN seekers changed directions to the older Prime's location.

Warily watching the plates of metal that shielded him melt away under the concentrated weapons fire, the defensive specialist jerked back in surprise when some of the bots from the Stonewall Defenders guild showed up and began to attack the Decepticons.

Almost instantly, the maneuver made perfect, and sickening, sense to the SPARTAN. The betraying seekers had directed some of the guild members out of the way, leaving the Prime only guarded by one member standing on her pedes and another injured and unlikely to be much of a threat.

He tried to curse out loud, praying to every god and deity he knew that anything that would alert the others to the distraction would come out of his malfunctioning vocalizer. With an abused screech, the mech's vocalizer components shorted out, leaving the mech without even the slimmest hope that he could warn the others.

With a quick apology to his fellow SPARTANs about the risks he knew he was about to run, Silentforce darted out of his hiding place to deal with the Decepticons himself.

It took three shots at nearly point blank range on top of the five previous shots from farther out to short out his shields; in that time nine Decepticons lost their lives. The defensive specialist took down another two by shooting the farthest ones with his own rifle before he finally got a hit that scored his frame for the first time since becoming Cybertronian.

A shot tore through his upper left arm, missing most of the vital wires and barely nicking an energon line, incurring shouts of protest from the other guild members there to witness the fight. _A graze_ , he thought dispassionately as he ripped through the nearest three in quick succession. The second shot that hit him punctured his left thigh, and the SPARTAN responded by releasing the governors limiting him to a civilian Cybertronian's reaction time.

Ten Decepticons went down in the space of a breem even as another volley of shots tore through parts of his chassis; most leaving wide, and heavily bleeding, gashes in his armor and frame.

One of the shots would have taken him down if it hadn't been for his SPARTAN backup systems. The injury had severed the main motor relay synapse for the left leg assembly by clipping his left hip joint, and the so far surviving Decepticons grinned even as another three fell to the flashing blur of red and black marred by the glint of bare metals and highlighted by splashes of energon, oil, and coolant.

The smirks faded as the mech took down another five as they watched and waited for him to slow, only just realizing that something was terribly wrong with their perception of events when the mech ignored his own injuries and kept fighting. When the shot had clipped the mech's hip joint, the Decepticons knew he should have gone down in a disabled heap of metal and wires. Cybertronian physiology held that any bot hit there was as good as disabled for most things.

Those closest to the mech had even holstered their weapons in anticipation of tearing the mech apart bare handed, even as he ripped his way through the few still in his reach. But the mech wasn't stopping, if anything he was getting more and more brutal in his methods of deactivation. The three guild members, one of which had encountered a stray shot and was out for the count, watched on in a terrified awe as one mech took out the remaining ten nearby while they shot at the ones farther away still.

Then the unthinkable happened, Silentforce _staggered_ under the continued assault, making all of the bots recall that the mech _was_ capable of feeling his injuries. He had dealt with the more physically inclined of the Decepticons, but the sharpshooters and cowards not intending to face him didn't have to come to grips with the SPARTAN-Bot in order to take him out.

Slumping to the side of the street again as the exchanged of weapons' fire increased when the guild bots realized the same thing the Decepticons did, the defensive specialist sent his location and condition to Spotter, as the only near pacifist in the SPARTAN ranks he would be less inclined to hunt down every Decepticon he could and would ensure that he got help when he needed it.

The last thing that Silentforce thought of as his processor began to slow from low energon levels and his CPU started an emergency stasis lock in a bid for survival, was a fading urgency to get to Sentinel Prime before the seeker betrayers deactivated him.

\V/

Since Drax and his trine were in the air with the understanding that they had to be fast in order to be of any help in Kaon, they had released the governors on their own frames before even leaving the _ATEHNS_.

When Spotter split off to ensure that Silentforce was still functioning after nearly being offlined by the Decepticon distraction, Drax lead Tigerstripe to the location the defensive specialist had given as the last location of Sentinel Prime.

Not bothering to slow down, the two seeker framed SPARTANs hit the ground with enough force to make the two slide a good distance down the street. With one look around, they took off again, Drax spared a grimace at the mess left behind by the three renegade seekers before he took off to try and locate the betrayers.

It wasn't as hard as it sounded, the three seekers had a ground bound mech with them and couldn't fly which left a limited stretch of space to be searched by the two SPARTANs. Tigerstripe spotted the seekers dragging a red mech down a road that lead out of Kaon and into the steppes of rock and metal that surrounded the city. With a scream of their turbines, the two honed in on their targets.

Starscream noticed them first, a conversation he had with Bonecrusher flitting to the forefront of his processors at the sight of the dark blue and black seeker now flying at them, seemingly with the intent of nose diving into Thunderstrike. Keeping quiet in the hopes that whoever in the Pits they were they could have the skill to deactivate his so called trine leader, the ex-scientist shifted his hold on the off-lined Sentinel Prime and wondered if he could talk the two new comers into replacing his soon to be deactivated trine.

Starscream didn't put much stock in the bragging of other bots, but he should have this one time.

Despite appearances, Tigerstripe hit first. Cloudwalker didn't get so much as a hint of his death before hand as the SPARTAN seeker dropped out of the sky and right on top of him, crushing his slimmer frame in several key places and making it impossible for the other seeker to use his lower chassis. Before he could even do more than screech from the sudden pain, the weapons specialist shot him thought the helm before swinging his rifle up under Starscream's jaw plate as the dark painted seeker copied his trine mate and smashed into Thunderstrike's back.

Rolling over his opponent, the SPARTAN trine leader and grappled with the other seeker on the ground, trying to get a hold of the slightly larger seeker's wires. Tigerstripe ignored the fuss, his faith fully in his trine leader as he held the last seeker in the betraying trine at gun point.

Starscream gritted his dental plates together, well aware that if nothing distracted the light painted, _massive_ seeker he would be enjoying the hospitality of the Autobots very soon.

As the fight just behind the larger white and gray seeker wound down, the former scientist took a chance to escape. Lunging just off to the side of the other seeker, the shot that would have severed his spinal array was knocked off course and barely clipped his vocalizer.

Knocking the larger seeker to the side with a well-timed kick, the ex-scientist took off without even a backwards glance to his trine mates.

Tigerstripe growled as he got back up to his pedes, torn between wanting to stay and cover his trine leader's skid plate and taking off after the other seeker. With a dismissive snort, the heavy weapons specialist slipped his rifle back into his subspace and crouched next to Sentinel Prime's heavily injured and battered frame.

\V/

Half way to Kaon, Warcry and Galeforce fell silent and refused to inform the others of why. Not that either SPARTAN really said much to begin with, but they even stopped responding to Ratchet's varied threats for full system checks if they ignored a question from Optimus Prime again.

Optimus had his own suspicions about the reason both SPARTAN mechs were silent, namely how one of their number had been in Kaon when the attack started earlier that cycle, and so he calmly suggested that the medical officer needed something of a response from the two.

Galeforce's rejoinder had been less than tactfully sated, and Optimus had to separate his medical officer from the SPARTANs for the rest of the trip.

Upon reaching Kaon in the very late joors of the cycle, Optimus had another reason to fear why the two SPARTANs had gone silent.

The city was still a war zone, fighting seemed to have taken up even in the far flung corners of the once proud city. The Autobot detachment followed Ultra Magnus' directions to a section of the city still defended by Autobot sympathizers and soldiers and a building that seemed to have come under attack several times in the intervening joors.

A femme and three mechs had posted themselves outside of the building and watched warily as the Autobots transformed into their bipedal modes. When the four recognized Optimus Prime's unit, they clasped their hands over their spark chambers and let them pass.

Chromia was sitting at the desk much like how she had been last megacycle, only this time she had a medic patching up her nicks and dents, especially the one on her helm. Catching sight of the Autobots, she hopped down from her seat and waved the still fussing medic on. "Optimus Prime, sir? I'm Chromia, welcome to the Stonewall Defenders' Guildhall. I'm sorry your visit had to be in such a fragged up time, but we are happy to see you, sir."

"Chromia, huh? Silentforce told me a bit about you." Warcry was barely containing his impatience to ensure his soldier was still functioning, but some much needed politeness had been smashed into his processor over the last few decacycles. "You're a weapons' expert, right?"

The blue and silver femme blinked a bit in surprise. "I didn't know he still talked to any of you all. I take it you're a part of that unit he came out of?"

"Warcry, SPARTAN-Bot Commander." Bowing to the femme earned him a light giggle, and the metallic green and black mech smirked a bit at her. "I do have a question, Chromia the weapons' expert; do you know Silentforce's current condition?"

"He… he took quite a few bad hits in a fight against what should have been impossible odds." The subject sobered the two, both losing what little enjoyment they obtained from the banter. "The medics' say they've never seen a system like his before, and they are still trying to puzzle most of his alterations out. But the energon loss somehow stopped on its own, and most of his more critical systems survived without much damage. How is more than they want to say at this time."

The tension lacing the tank commander's frame eased as Galeforce muttered some curses almost out of audio range.

Chromia caught a bit of it and managed a small smirk. "Your right, he is a glitched out stubborn aft of a mech."

"And Sentinel Prime?" The femme's optics dropped to the floor, and Optimus got a sinking feeling that he was now the only Prime left.

"We weren't fast enough, sir."

Slouching his way down the stairs at the back of the building, a banged up Drax came into the view of those in the main floor. Spotter, his frame splashed with energon and a weird light blue metal scoring his paint, and Tigerstripe, who sported a coat of grime over his light colored paint, followed their trine leader.

"Sentinel's seeker detachment betrayed then offlined him while the Decepticons distracted us, and he deactivated from the injuries sustained before we got a medic to his side. The same medic said later that he had been infected with a virus intended to kill him outright, even if he survived his injuries." The dark painted SPARTAN trine leader stood facing the newly arrived Autobots with his pedes braced and his hands clasped behind his back, just under his wings. "I'm sorry sir. There wasn't anything else we could have done. If Silentforce hadn't been so injured, he could have gotten back in time to save Sentinel, but in order for that to happen he would have been forced to abandon his fellow guild members to the Decepticons sent in to distract any reinforcements sent along with the seekers."

"I… I see. Thank you, Drax." Optimus shut his optics off for an astrosecond, processing what the seeker had told him. With a bracing intake of air, the Prime turned to Warcry. "Kaon is now a Decepticon held city. I… dislike leaving the civilians to the Decepticons, but I see no way to ensure that we do not lose more bots than we have to in trying to take back the city. I'm pulling the Autobots out."

Chromia made a face at the Prime's back, but she could understand that. Kaon had fallen too far to be reclaimed easily, and the Autobots had already suffered a great loss already in the city.

The tank nodded at the casual suggestion that could be taken as an order. "Then as soon as Silentforce is able to travel, we'll send him to Central with Holdout and Refit. Drax, you and your trine will provide security here until he can move on his own."

"One moment, please." A mech just reaching under Optimus' own height had followed the seeker trine down the stairs. "My designation is Stonewall; I'm the Guild Master of this protection guild. May I have a word with you and Warcry, Optimus Prime?"

The now sole Prime of the Autobots nodded as he motioned for the tank to follow him. Stonewall lead the two to the third floor and into his office.

"I don't wish to sound ungrateful, your trine is the only reason this building is still standing, but I do have some concerns about the type of bots your… 'SPARTANs' seem to be."

Warcry tilted his helm, confused by the way the conversation was going. Optimus rested a hand on the back of the slightly shorter tank. "I do know what you mean. I have watched them in battle as well, and if your concerns are about their loyalty…"

"No, that's not it." Stonewall took a seat behind his desk, marveling that it might just be for the last time. He extended a hand so the two mechs now in his office would take their own. "It's more about what Silentforce did to end up so injured, and his behavior that I observed beforehand."

"Do you have a problem with how he has conducted himself?" The tank CO could admit he was very lost in where this was going.

With a shake of his helm, Stonewall shot that issue down as well.

"No. Do you know the odds Silentforce went up against? There had been about forty-five in the group he went up against. By all accounts there had only been about a handful of bots left standing after he got though ripping them apart, in some cases literally limb form limb, and they were the ones hanging back and shooting. That's about thirty or so bots in a short amount of time while collecting enough injuries to rival his frame's condition with Sentinel's."

Leaning forward, it seemed to him that the tank was lost but the Prime was not.

"Your trine, Drax and his fellow seekers, are the only reason we still have this section of the city. They go out in rotation, one seeker takes a break while two scout for trouble, more often than not coming down and helping the ground bound with defense. I had no… well, no, I have to say that I've known they were warrior built the instant I met them, but they do not conduct themselves like any fighters or soldiers I've ever seen before. When Silentforce got here nearly half a vorn ago it was a struggle to get him to talk at all, even though a data pad. Your trine brings back the few issues we had with him, mostly a lack of concern with the basic necessities that most Cybertronians seem to consider important. It's almost like… like they have a basic layout of a personality matric, but most of it is unused or undeveloped. They are unconcerned with anything other than their designated functions, anything else is considered unnecessary, including their fuel rights."

The Prime gave the Guild Master a long searching look. "They are not newly built bots; the oldest in the unit I believe has just turned sixty vorns old."

Warcry nodded his confirmation; Clearsight had just turned sixty last megacycle, much to the horror of the scout when she got teased mercilessly by the other femmes.

"They have no need for the same amount of fuel and recharge as most Cybertronians. As for the rest, only they can tell you that. It is personal to them, and if Silentforce feels you are to be trusted he will give you a recommendation to be included into their circle of confidence."

Stonewall frowned as he considered that.

"Alright, I'll trust you on that. But since the SPARTANs are the only reason we still have this part of the city, we'll have to pull out with them." The mech shook his helm. "The medics gave an estimate of a few cycles until they have Silentforce back on his pedes, we'll escort him to Central with the trine."

"It will be sooner than that." Optimus had a fond sort of smile on his faceplate. "Ratchet is familiar with the SPARTANs' systems, he has worked on them before. He will have Silentforce up and running in a matter of joors."

\V/

Ratchet blew into the 'repair ward' with the force of a category three hurricane, not that any of the Cybertronians knew what that particular weather pattern was.

Galeforce watched as the Head Medic for Iacon, who had volunteered to be the medic for the Prime's mission the moment he heard who was injured, work his way steadily though the numerous injured that had retreated to the guild building with the help of the bots still on their pedes.

In a short amount of time, Ratchet had seen to all of the bots that couldn't move due to battle injuries and was now concentrating on the walking wounded as he monitored the repairs he had made as they integrated within the injured bots' systems. Shaking his helm at the rather badly startled medics that had managed to find their way here through the mess that had become of Kaon's streets, the combat engineer snuck off to see to his wounded squad mate.

Chromia was right, Silentforce was a mess.

His bad condition was compounded by the fact that none of the medics wanted to inadvertently injure the mech further, so they had taken to working on the defensive specialist's injuries only when they understood the affected systems. That left a lot that hadn't been repaired.

Mercifully, the medics were also keeping the mech in stasis lock so Silentforce couldn't feel any of it.

They had removed the SPARTAN's armor, leaving splashes of black paint over the silvery blue gleam of his bare proto frame. His metallic red armor plates had been piled up in a corner of the room, still dripping bits of slowly hardening energon and oil into a puddle on the floor.

The mech himself had a few weld marks here and there; a good number of his fluid lines had the dried silver sealant covering sections of tubing at a time; and his vocalizer had been completely removed, disassembled, and set out on a nearby table that also held a selection of tools.

Galeforce pulled a face at his fellow stasis locked SPARTAN. Waiting with the unconscious wasn't his favorite duty, but at least there was something he could do.

When Ratchet finally had seen to all of the still online patients, he was unsurprised to see the SPARTAN steadily working through the discarded armor of his 'brother' when the medic eventually ended up in the room the other medics had stashed the off-lined frame of Silentforce's.

Ignoring the SPARTAN mech sitting in the corner of the room, Ratchet looked over what needed to be done with the defensive specialist. With a much put upon sigh, the Head Medic of Iacon got to work, stopping only to explain some of what he was doing to the medics that had followed him in.

\V/

Silentforce's first thought when his processor booted up was: _Ow_. His frame hurt.

Scratch that, _everything_ hurt. He spent a few moments simply registering where and what stung, throbbed, or ached, cataloguing his rather long laundry list of injuries before it occurred to him to wonder _why_ he was injured.

Bringing one optic online, he caught sight of one medic he hoped he wouldn't have to see for another vorn and a half at the earliest. : _Slaggit. What happened, doc bot?_ :

Ratchet's optic ridges drew together. "Give it a breem, then you tell me, you glitched out _fragger_."

A sudden movement drew the injured SPARTAN mech's attention to Galeforce, who had finally put down a rag and the plates of Silentforce's armor. The defensive specialist stared at his squad mate and the discarded armor, wondering what had happened that would draw both Autobots to Kaon and if that meant both Warcry and Optimus Prime was here as well.

He had been watching for it, but Ratchet was still surprised by the sudden jerk that set him completely upright when the SPARTAN finally recalled why he was damaged as badly as he was. Silentforce swung his pedes off the berth he had been confined to for most of the cycle, hissing as some newly repaired systems complained loudly about the sudden abuse before he could control the reaction.

"Now wait just a moment, you _slagged up piece of junk_! I just got done fixing you, if you really think you're getting out of this room before I _fragging say_ you can; you've got another thing coming."

Galeforce stepped into the way when Silentforce tried to ignore the medic to lunge out of the room. The combat engineer caught his fellow SPARTAN when his left motor relay system collapsed again, sending the defensive specialist stumbling.

"Now, now, 'force. You're in enough trouble without adding ignoring a superior officer to the list, and a medic to boot. Shadow' is spitting mad at you, and not for robbing her of help when she needs it. She almost abandoned her position and came up here to beat the spinal supports out of you herself for such a… how did she put it? Oh yeah… something she expected out of a glitched up turbo-hare, not an action in battle from a fellow SPARTAN."

Silentforce scrabbled at the other SPARTAN's arm for balance. Once he was mostly situated on his right, the defensive specialist looked between the two mechs. : _What happened after I…_ :

"Passed the frag out?" Galeforce smirked at the annoyed expression that crossed the other SPARTAN mech's faceplate. "Sentinel was deactivated, Drax and Tigerstripe got two of the three seekers that betrayed the Prime, and we are to pull you out to Central. Well, once you can stand on your own pedes again."

Hoisting the armor less mech back on the berth he tried to abandon, Galeforce's smirk widened at the very ticked off expression on the Autobot medic's faceplate.

"Now, I need to go and report that Humpty Dumpty here is back together again, and help Warcry with the plans to pull the civilians out."

Ratchet blinked after the gray and green mech. "Humpty Dumpty?"

Silentforce just rubbed a hand over his faceplate in response, either ignoring the comment or trying to pretend that it didn't apply to him.

"Fraggers. Would you like to know why you couldn't talk, Silentforce?" The armor less mech looked up warily, not entirely sure what the even tone in the medic's vocalizer meant for him. "Take a look at this."

The lump of blackened metal and wires the yellow medic held out confused the SPARTAN at first, until he caught the sight of something slimy in what used to be a vocalizer component.

: _That . . . that's mine?_ : Silentforce recoiled a bit as he realized exactly what he was looking at.

"For some reason, your vocalizer didn't convert over with the rest of you." Ratchet peered into the slimy mess of burned and nearly liquefied flesh that composed the inner workings of the silent mech's vocalizer. "It's rather disgusting looking, because you tried to fragging _use_ it. The organic composition failed to stand up to the demands of a Cybertronian's vocalizer, and pretty much fried the slagging mess."

The medic poked at the slimy organic _thing_ that coated the inside of the vocalizer as the SPARTAN watched in a sort of fascinated horror.

: _Does this mean that I can get my vocal system fixed?_ : Silentforce thought that Ratchet's description of the current state of his vocalizer was apt. The burned and blistered flesh did look disgusting to his optics, now used to metal and stones rather than the organic sights he had seen as a human SPARTAN.

"It would have been fragging _fixed_ a long aft time ago if you hadn't ran off like a tin built coward, you junkyard reject." The medic threw the half-organic part onto the nearest table, dismissing the faulty part. "Now, let's see about the rest of your systems, and what damage your half processed attempt to run caused yourself."

\V/

Zephyr, Dreadnought, and Trickflip watched on as Shadowdancer glared down at her sparkling, claws braced on her hip joints and door-wings flared. Kynaite pouted back up at her, thin arms crossed over his equally tiny chassis with his lower lip plate pushed forward.

The stare down continued in complete silence, one that had only been broken when Dreadnought had entered the nearly gutted warehouse a bit earlier.

The Praxian femme had already told Zephyr what was going on, namely that one of her other brothers had an accident and Trickflip would be taking over for him in Kaon. She refused on elaborating how the two intended to get past the Decepticon blockade against traffic in and out of Gygax, just remarking that it wasn't the hardest thing she had ever done.

Kynaite, who only at that time noticed something was wrong with their normal cycle routine of getting up, getting fuel, then proceeding to make loud noises for most of the cycle; protested the second part of his new carrier's plan, namely that she would be leaving him with the ex-Enforcer for a cycle or two. Despite not being able to speak out loud with any coherency, he had sent his displeasure with that idea loudly to his carrier over their bond.

This argument ended with the stare off currently being held between the Praxian and her sparkling, both refusing to change their processors about what they wanted to happen.

Zephyr was slightly confused on how Shadowdancer seemed to know what the bitlit was thinking, but she was amused at the attempt of her femme friend to match wits with her own adopted creation and placed a bet with Trickflip on Kynaite. She had agreed to leave the Enforcers, not really her dream function in the first place, to help her new friend watch over the sparkling that she hadn't protested too much against adopting. Zephyr was going to be one of the server femmes; because, instead of drones, Shadowdancer wanted actual Cybertronians to maintain the bar.

Dreadnought was more than just a little confused. Shadowdancer had talked him out of his job, fixing fights for gladiators in a rundown arena, to help her out with her latest project, namely creating and running her own bar. She hired him on as a bartender and as a repair mech, and he was supposed to be here to help the Praxian femme plan out where everything was going.

He was game enough for the job, at this point mostly comprised with gutting the warehouse she had bought and fixing up enough of the ground floor to begin to convert it to a classy type of place. Once he had arrived with the intention to start work on what would later be the actual bar top, he had been terribly confused when he spotted his new employer arguing with the incoherent babble that passed as Kynaite's current method of speech. After Zephyr let him in on what was going on, he placed a bet on Shadowdancer winning the argument.

Barely hiding his grin at the sight of his superior officer arguing with her own sparkling, Trickflip held onto the bets while silently agreeing with the ex-Enforcer on what was likely to happen.

The infiltrator had only been in Gygax for a few megacycles, but he already knew that Shadowdancer was a sucker for whatever the bit of metal and wires wanted. He figured it was the tactician trying to compensate for her own horrible youngling hood, or rather childhood, as a SPARTAN trainee that prevented her from being able to deny the sparkling what he wanted.

He currently had a bet going with the other two that the confrontation would only take another breem to end.

Finally, after the breem Trickflip had assured the other two about, Kynaite's lower lip plate trembled and Shadowdancer threw up her hands in defeat.

"Fine, you can come with! But I swear, Kynaite, if you so much as act up when we get there, I'll… I'll… I don't know what I'll do, but I guarantee that you won't like it!" Stomping off to the other three, she pointedly ignored the sparkling's chitter of victory. "Zep', never mind about the sparkling sitting. Trick' just… just watch him while I sort out some things."

Shadowdancer huffed angrily to herself as she left the warehouse.

Trickflip turned to the ex-Enforcer and handed her the credits she won. "Are you sure you two can handle the rest of this?" He waved a hand at the rather depressing interior of the warehouse.

"We'll be fine." Dreadnought took his loss with commendable aplomb, taking a file out of Shadowdancer's behavioral programming and ignoring the giggle that the ex-Enforcer gave in reply. "Da boss femme left enough credits ta hire help when we need it, 'n she already paid us fer da work we'll do while she's out. Sides, she already said she'd only be gone fer ah cycle or so."

He patted the SPARTAN mech on the arm as he got around to doing the work he had come in for.

"If you're sure, I don't suppose it will do much to argue." Trickflip frowned at the work that still needed to be done in Shadowdancer's bid to remain in Gygax.

As a bar owner, the Praxian would have reason to have a staff, and Zephyr had already agreed to sparkling sit when she needed to meet with the high-grade suppliers and other such meetings that managers of businesses have to do. That would provide a bit of cover for the SPARTAN XO, as well as another source of income to cover her new expenses with a sparkling to provide for. Kynaite didn't have the system set up that the SPARTANs did, which meant he needed more fuel and recharge than his carrier and her 'siblings' did.

All in all, it was an inventive twist to Rook's own business plan, taking a warehouse and changing it to what she needed. The saboteur had been vastly amused to learn what the other SPARTAN femme had done with her idea, and wrangled a promise for free high-grade if she ever managed to visit.

With a shake of his helm, the infiltrator scooped Kynaite into his arms as the sparkling clicked happily at his 'uncle'.

"Well then, it was nice to meet the both of you. I'm sorry I couldn't stay longer." He smirked at half-sparked wave aimed at him from the mech ripping part of the wall out, bowed to the flier femme as she giggled again and waved to the sparkling in his arms.


	11. Chapter 11

Ultra Magnus took the news of Sentinel's death rather badly. Since he had been the one to be entrusted with the older Prime's continuing function, he considered the failure to be his even if he had been in the fighting at the very edge of Kaon's city walls with the few Enforcers he could gather up and nowhere near Sentinel when the seekers betrayed the Prime.

Nothing that Drax, Warcry, or Optimus Prime had tried had changed the large mech's processor. Giving up for the time being as the trine leader tried to argue the larger mech out of his current depressed slump, the SPARTAN CO turned his attention to his recently repaired subordinate and ensuring he was in good enough condition to continue as a SPARTAN.

Ratchet had nearly blown a gasket when Galeforce had reluctantly admitted to him that a 'SPARTAN system check' was actually closer to a full out spar.

Since most of the bots in the guild building of the Stonewall Defenders were fully repaired now, even the Head Medic of Iacon couldn't come up with a reason to forestall the so called system check. He muttered and grumbled in the corner of the main floor's only room, glaring at the back of the SPARTAN tank.

Warcry ignored the medic's ire, and concentrated on the simple warm-ups. "You know, you could wait for Trick' to get here, or spar with Gale'."

The red and black mech, stuck in his half demolished armor for the time being, simply shrugged in reply as he tested the limits of his limbs and ensured that they matched up with what was normal range for him before his near-deactivation. : _I could also wait for three-four-one, but I won't._ :

"Sure, if you wanted to get deactivated. I heard she's still annoyed with you." Warcry grinned at the wary expression on the defensive specialist's faceplate.

Chromia, having only heard half of what was said, spoke up from the side lines where she was watching with Ironhide. "She who?"

"Their XO, Shadowdancer." The burly black mech spoke for the two SPARTANs, who decided to start the spar at that very moment. "She's ah bit… mean, ah think."

Ironhide rubbed under his jaw plate as he watched the SPARTANs work their way up in speed, starting slow, and increasing the rate of hits when it was apparent that the pace didn't stress the red and black mech's system repairs.

"Not mean 'n she would deactivate ya for lookn' at her ta wrong way, mean 'n ya do sometin stupid 'n she'll beat da slag out 'o ya."

The blue and silver femme blinked at the mech standing next to her.

"She's coming here?" Chromia tilted her helm at the rather gleeful look that suddenly crossed Ratchet's faceplate. "Is that a good thing?"

"Depends on who you ask," the Autobot medic rubbed his hands together as he smirked at the back of the silent mech he was watching for any signs for something being wrong, "but I can get her to report on the others if they are still fragging injured, so it's a good thing for me."

"Can't wait to meet her." The femme weapons' expert crossed her arms over her chassis as she watched the spar with the two Autobots, wondering if she should be wary of such a femme.

\V/

Trickflip reached the guild building a bit ahead of Shadowdancer and her sparkling. The infiltrator slapped the defensive specialist on the back as he raced inside the building, causing most of the bots that turned out to see the SPARTAN-Bots' XO to stare after him.

Warcry shook his helm as the looks turned his way. "She's torqued."

"With 'force? Why?" Chromia frowned down the direction that the acid green and black mech had appeared from.

Silentforce held up his hands in a gesture of innocence and backed up a few steps. : _Not with me, at least. Some other bot._ :

"She's annoyed with 'force, not torqued. This is something else." Galeforce edged backwards, far enough not to be in the Praxian femme's line of sight when she finally got to the building. Jazz and Prowl looked at each other before retreating to the back of the group as well.

The black and electric blue Cybertronian that showed up in the distance, speeding her way through the empty streets without slowing, confused most of the bots that had never met the SPARTAN XO before. Shadowdancer didn't even slow as she approached the building, only hitting her breaks and sliding the rest of the way once she was nearly twenty feet from the bots that had turned out to greet her.

Transforming to her bipedal form, she snatched the sparkling that had been enjoying the wild ride out of her interior and delicately set the clicking bundle of wires and metal in Optimus' hands before drilling her fist into the side of Ultra Magnus' faceplate as the rest of the bots watched in confusion.

Kynaite clicked a happy greeting as the very confused Prime peered down at him, his adopted carrier now glaring at the now prone mech with her hands on her hip joints and her door-wings flared in irritation.

"If my soldiers said there was nothing to be done, there was no way for you to have changed what happened. Worst case scenario would have you deactivated along with Sentinel; in a better one you still would have still missed the seekers' betrayal. We couldn't do anything to change that, what makes you so sure you would have changed the ultimate outcome?"

Magnus gaped at the femme, still feeling the punch that dented the side of his faceplate. "We-I… I could have done _something_!"

"Even Sentinel was blindsided by the seekers. What is it that has you so convinced you would have made a difference?" Shadowdancer crossed her arms over her chassis, only sparing a brief look to ensure that Kynaite was enjoying himself in Optimus' hands before returning her attention to the Autobots' military commander.

Jazz skirted the current mini-confrontation in order to get a look at what the SPARTAN femme had set in the Prime's hands, beckoning Prowl and Ratchet over to see once he saw what it was. The medic's optic ridges drew together at the sight of the sparkling, casting a quick glare to the back of the Praxian femme as Kynaite squeaked at the strange bot that looked like his carrier.

Magnus started to get annoyed at the femme. Miraculous alien warriors or not, there was no way they could have any idea… he blinked as something new occurred to his CPU. The SPARTAN-Bots hadn't tried to cover up what they did as human SPARTANs, and it was conceivable that too they had also lost the individuals they had been responsible for.

"I… how many?"

"Three for myself." Shadowdancer huffed out a sigh as she held out a hand to the red and blue mech. "I believe it was five for 'force, and another scattering of handfuls among the rest of us."

Pulling the much taller mech back to his pedes, the Praxian took her sparkling back from a mildly bemused Optimus with only a quick glance to the other Autobots looking from her to the sparkling.

"I do hope you behaved yourself, bitlit." The sparkling squeaked as he was pulled out of the larger mech's hands, consenting to the handling with brief series of confused clicks.

Ultra Magnus rubbed at the dent the femme had given him as he gave bundle of blue and silver metal in the femme's arms a sideways look. "You didn't have to hit me."

"Would you have listened to me without it?"

The XO spared a glance in his direction as the sparkling proceeded to tell her exactly what he thought of being passed around, even if it had been funny to see a bot that looked like her.

"Yes, it sucks slag. It is incredibly unfair to a soldier to have to lose what they are to guard in such an underhanded manner, without even a fair fight for it. But, when he wanders off on his own, you can't blame any bot but him. It is also incredibly insulting to the rest of us when you question what we could have done better. If this Chromia femme could have somehow learned that the seekers were betraying Sentinel when she was assisting the injured bot, would any of the government bots, or even Sentinel himself, listen to her? If Silentforce could have retreated before the Decepticons reached him, would he then have had to sacrifice the other guild bots just to save one mech?"

Shadowdancer hefted Kynaite into a better position as she turned to the large Autobot.

"What ifs will only drive you and the rest of us mad." She frowned at the protesting bundle in her arms. "I need a room, a quiet one if you all don't mind. It's well past time for Kynaite's nap."

"Second floor, Shadow'." Warcry waggled his finger joints at the bitlit in his XO's hands as she calmly walked off. The tank looked around at the mishmash of bots that stared after her. "And yes, that was Shadowdancer, Executive Officer of the SPARTAN-Bots."

Galeforce snickered from his position behind Ironhide's frame. "Gotta love that femme's style, bitlit attached and all."

"And when, pray tell, did you slaggers intend to inform the rest of us that she has a sparkling?" Ratchet frowned at the dent the Praxian femme caused Magnus before confronting the three SPARTAN mechs, optics narrowing at the sudden panicked looks that crossed their faceplates.

Warcry exchanged a sheepish look with Silentforce as Galeforce spoke up for them. "Uh… just now?"

(ooo000ooo)

Kynaite took two joors for a nap. In the meantime, the SPARTAN mechs consolidated the plans they had made up and handed them off to the XO as she watched over the sparkling's recharge.

Eventually, she handed back down the corrected plans, which the SPARTANs and Autobots immediately got on implementing. When Shadowdancer appeared back to the main floor with Kynaite clicking in her arms, Ratchet demanded to know how she got her pointed claws on the sparkling.

"It's not yours, I can tell that from here. Where are his creators?"

"Deactivated," the XO set the now curious sparkling in the medic's hands, watching intently as the medic looked the bitlit over, "I investigated that before he bonded with me. The Enforcer we saw about his circumstances told me that."

She set her claws on her hip joints as the medic nodded for her to continue.

"There isn't much else to tell. The medics in Gygax told me he's a bit more advanced than normal, but overall healthy."

Kynaite amused himself by trying to nibble the paint off Ratchet's hands during his impromptu checkup, causing the medic to snort. "Well, they're right. But fr… uh, hmm."

The medic handed the sparkling back to his adopted carrier, trying to contain his more volatile vocabulary before the femme slapped him.

"Don't worry about it. He's probably heard worse from me." Flicking her door-wings, Shadowdancer looked around for a moment before turning back to Ratchet. "Where are the others?"

"Warcry left with Ultra Magnus and Prowl to see about fighting a hole through the Decepticon forces outside of the city with what's left of the Enforcers; Galeforce is with Ironhide, Chromia, and Optimus organizing the non-fighters so they don't get in the way; the trine is still out scouting; and Silentforce is with his guild members stripping down the building for anything they want to take with them." Still giving the femme a wary look, the medic pointed to the doorway. "Trickflip and Jazz left a little while ago, citing that he had to get to work."

"I suppose that means I have to get to work as well." Sighing, Shadowdancer considered the bit of metal and wires in her claws for a moment, then turned to the medic. "I need to see Optimus. Can you watch Kynaite for a bit?"

"Sure…?" The XO set the sparkling down and told him not to get in the way before leaving the building for Galeforce's location. Ratchet looked down as Kynaite looked up and grinned at him. "…aw, slag."

(ooo000ooo)

By the time Jazz got back from scouting around the city with Trickflip, Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus were almost ready to start the retreat with the Stonewall Defenders guild bots.

Shadowdancer was assigned a role in a non-combative position, much to her extreme disgust, even though she didn't argue about it.

The bots didn't encounter much resistance to their retreat; most of the way had been cleared already by both the fighters in the group and by the two sneaky mechs setting up traps for the unwary Decepticon scouts. Trickflip left them once the bots reached the walls, giving the officers a quick salute before he disappeared.

Once out of sight of the city, the group once again started making plans for what to do now that they were out. The few arguments were being carried out under Optimus' watch as the SPARTAN mechs and Autobot soldiers pulled guard for the group.

Since Kynaite wasn't the only youngling or sparkling in the mishmash group, Shadowdancer volunteered to watch them as the adult framed bots 'discussed' what they wanted to do. She stood with Chromia as Kynaite played with Jazz and the other younglings, as the saboteur tried to get Prowl to play as well with limited success.

With a fond grin on her faceplate, her sparkling was all but running the silver mech into the ground with his built up energy, the Praxian femme turned to the other. "What about you?"

Chromia started a bit, pulling her optics from where she had been watching the mechs pulling guard. Drax and Ironhide had gotten into an animated discussion involving something well within ogling range. "Err… what?"

"Plans for after you get where you're going?" The Praxian smirked when the other femme glared at her briefly, well aware of what Chromia had been doing under the pretense of helping her watch the younglings.

"I suppose I'll join the Autobots. My cohort sister is one, she'll help me out."

Shadowdancer frowned at Chromia, tilting her helm to the side as she took stock of the other femme's frame.

"Your sister is Elita One, isn't she?" She shook her helm with a smirk. "I should have seen it, you two look alike."

The weapons' expert smirked back. "Same frame and everything, just a different color. Yeah, you should have seen the similarities."

Their attention was diverted when Kynaite got the drop on Jazz, sending the silver mech crashing to the ground with the rest of the young bots giving a few gleeful and loud clicks of delight as Prowl quickly suppressed a small smirk. Chromia snickered at the surprised look on the saboteur's faceplate as the sparkling climbed on top of his chassis.

"Not bad, for a sparkling. Do… do you know Elita?"

"Met her a while ago." Shadowdancer flicked her door-wings once, Kynaite turned to look at her for a moment before getting off of Jazz with a pout. "Nice femme, she's under Magnus' command last I knew. She's in Iacon if she didn't get reassigned somewhere else."

"Huh… then I'm for Iacon." Chromia gave the mechs on guard duty one last look before walking off to talk to her guild masters. "I'll be seeing you later Shadow'."

\V/

The SPARTAN part of the convoy escorting the bots heading to Iacon broke off once they got close to Central.

The trine split off back to the _ATHENS_ as the four adult frame SPARTANs and the little sparkling headed off to Holdout's living unit. Luckily for them, the tracker had just left to pick up Refit from the Academy, and Shadowdancer picked the electronic lock once Silentforce took Kynaite from her. They only had a few breems to wait until the two SPARTAN femmes joined the others.

Refit made a bee line for Silentforce and Kynaite, the little sparkling was fascinated by his silent uncle and sat in his lap while his carrier was out getting energon for the group with Galeforce. Holdout greeted Warcry, who was trying not to break her couch just by sitting on it, and gave a wave to the stoic mech currently under the fussing of the youngest two in the group. "Did ya all have fun?"

Silentforce gave the tracker a glare, trying to ignore Refit's loud chatter about the current state of his armor and systems and the sparklings attempts to get him to speak by poking at where his vocalizer used to be.

The tank shrugged while balancing on the edge of his seat, not too sure about how much weight the couch could hold without breaking. "A few good things came out of it, Ratchet found out what was keeping Silentforce so silent."

Holdout snickered at the optic roll that the defensive specialist gave at the crack. : _Like I haven't heard that one before._ :

"I think we've heard it, or a variation of it, three times on this trip alone." Shadowdancer held the door for Galeforce before turning back to the other SPARTANs. "It does present a problem though. What else didn't convert over when this slag happened?"

Refit squeaked and held her hands over Kynaite's audio receptors. "Ma'am! That sort of language is not something a sparkling should be hearing!"

Said sparkling looked at her weirdly before pulling the medic in training's hands off his helm while clicking at her in disapproval. That had felt odd.

The XO just raised an optic ridge. "We're living in a Decepticon held city; do you know the percentage of bots that will modulate their language files in the presence of a sparkling in Gygax? I'll give you a hint, it's _extremely_ low."

Galeforce snorted as he handed out some cubes of energon.

"So, as to why the rest of us are here. Refit?" When the slighter femme looked up, the combat engineer gave her a small smile. "We already know about the nanites in our fluid lines, what else is different about us?"

Knightblade and Wheeljack had discovered that tidbit a megacycle ago. The sniper had some free time as Perceptor held a conference about something or another, and the two had used the time to investigate the strange liquid metal that leaked out of Knightblade's slit coolant line.

Wheeljack was fascinated, and a little put out that they could have guessed what the culprit was.

Biofoam, the old medical standby of SPARTANs everywhere, was another of the All-Spark affected items on the _ATHENS_. Instead of simply containing any fluid loss by filling up empty space and hardening in place, the foam was now a type of nanite gel that was produced somewhere in their frames.

The nanites bonded together when there was an injury, making a flimsy temporary patch over the damaged sections. This had been vigorously tested by Silentforce's near deactivation from fluid loss, something the rest of the SPARTANs were not anxious to test again.

The trine had recently discovered three drums of the stuff, and when Spotter cracked one of the drums open to inspect the contents, the blue liquid metal inside surprised him since the sniper had shared what she learned with the others. Knightblade had requested a drum to study, the drum that the recon scout seeker had opened had hardened too much to be useful, and the last drum had been sent to Xenon to see what he and Ratchet thought of it.

Refit shook her helm. "There isn't much that differs between a normal Cybertronian and our frames. There are the obvious bits; the blue tint to our protoframe, the carbide ceramic struts, the augmentations to both the neural relay system and the motor systems. There are some small differences between our optics, obviously some peculiarities with our frames and secondary systems, and our spark chamber."

She shrugged at the expectant looks.

"That's it so far."

Shadowdancer frowned at the slighter femme. "Our optics?"

"We are a bit sensitive to bright lights. Haven't found a reason why yet." The former AI picked up her nephew and cradled the sparkling in her lap. "So, how long are you staying?"

"Not long." The XO reached out and let Kynaite climb up to her arms before sitting down next to the tank. "I have to get back soon, but I thought you would like to meet him before that."

\V/

Starscream frowned at the records being displayed for him.

There was no file about any seekers that could 'disappear' from visual range, not even in the records held in Vos where the primary seeker Youth Sector had been for centivorns. The now confirmed _Decepticon_ Supreme Air Commander glared up at the ceiling as he thought about what that meant.

Either some bot had hacked both sets of digital records, the one held by the Aero Space Division and the one held by the Vos Council, or such a seeker type didn't exist at all.

This was a problem the former scientist couldn't leave alone. Bonecrusher had smirked knowingly when the seeker had demanded his so called proof, and handed the vid the deactivated triple changer Blitzwing had transmitted to him for a hefty amount of credits.

The recording of the attack on Iacon was grainy at best, a poor quality vid that nonetheless was impossible to tamper with. Even with that detracting element to the vid Blitzwing had recorded the sight of the dark painted seeker, the same one that deactivated Thunderstrike, who flickered into view a split astrosecond before he collided with the triple changer… as well as some type of transport that bore alien designs on the side.

Starscream tapped his claws on the table next to him. The only lead he had, was the symbol painted on the left wings of the two seekers he had seen, and the left arm of that red and black mech that almost ruined Thunderstrike's plan to offline Sentinel Prime.

\V/

One optic shut, the other idly browsing through a digital catalogue from some bot in Praxus, Nitro barely twitched when a few Enforcers walked through his shop's front door. "Business related, or are you two just looking?"

When the two bots in his peripheral vision hesitated, the SPARTAN-Bots' demolitions specialist finally looked up to his visitors and looked them over.

They looked almost exactly like the Enforcers of Simfur did; they had the tan decals of the city's police force displayed on the upper part of their right arms, but something about the two seemed off to the SPARTAN. Nitro drummed his fingertips on the countertop that he had been leaning against.

Being visited by Enforcers wasn't an unusual occurrence, it happened every now and again due to the high rate of illegal upgrades happening in the mainly Neutral City. Usually, the Praxian would get some type of warning before getting visited by Enforcers on duty, and when they visited off-duty the Enforcers usually only came in by themselves.

These two gave no forward notice, not even a generic message stating that an inspection may happen in the next megacycle or two.

They were acting very strange, for Enforcers anyways. The demolitions specialist flicked his door-wings a bit higher than he usually held them, narrow optics looking the two over more carefully as they seemed to reach a silent agreement about something.

Enforcer decals, but theirs had faded or scratched away the serial number that would identify them in case a bot needed to file a complaint. As one bot walked up to the counter the tan and gray mech was against, the other seemed to wander the isles that held mockups of more popular items sold in the shop.

Nitro never displayed the actual pieces, figuring that to do so was inviting a robbery or something similar and the general marching orders given to the SPARTANs before they left Iacon stated that they were to stay peaceful unless actually threatened. He never did figure out if having his place of business attacked in such a way fell under 'personal assault' or not.

Straightening up, the Praxian gave the suspicious Enforcer in front of him a long look, a secondary processor tracking the movements of the other through the store. "May I help you?"

"I'm looking for certain… uh, chemicals." The Enforcer fidgeted a bit, then held out a datapad to the Praxian mech. "These. Got 'em?"

Nitro cautiously took the proffered pad and looked it over. He caught sight of rapid movement out of the corner of his optics, and snapped a hand up to rip the baton that the mech had swung out of his grip.

Tossing the startled mech the data pad to distract him, he definitely was not an Enforcer bot by his actions or reactions; he jumped over his counter and kicked out at the mid-section of the mech's chassis as the startled bot tried to catch the pad. The fake Enforcer smashed into a wall, alerting his partner that something was going wrong.

As that mech took off for the back of the store, trying to evade the shopkeeper, Nitro tipped one of the display cases over to crash down on him before he got too far.

With a sigh, the Praxian mech turned off his open sign before calling the actual Enforcers about his little problem currently sprawled out on the floor. This was going to cut into his bottom line.

(ooo000ooo)

The Enforcers that responded to the call, two sergeants and a trainee, were very impressed with the mess he had made of his store.

The femme sergeant, who introduced herself as Roulette, peered around at the sheer clutter of ripped up metal on the floor, trying to track the altercation as the shopkeeper explained what had happened as her partner showed the rookie how to take a bot's statement after the event being reported had happened.

Door-wings just barely twitching in agitation, the Praxian rattled off what tipped him off to the Enforcer's false identity to the ones currently standing in front of him and the actions that occurred after the bot tried to hit him. Nitro gave the two a copy of the security vids taken during the attempted assault, they couldn't call it a robbery since nothing had been taken, and shooed the three out of his shop while claiming that he had to clean up before next cycle.

After a joor of doing just that in case the Enforcers were watching, the SPARTAN mech abandoned the still messy shop floor for the basement and let himself into one of the underground storage spaces under his shop.

The second bot, the one that tried to run from him, was hanging upside down with his hands chained to the floor and glaring at the blank wall.

"They'll figure out that there were two bots that entered." The mech only twitched when the door had finally opened, he had expected the strange mech a little sooner.

"I have no doubt about that." The Praxian took a seat on one of the crates in the tiny room he had cleared out to hold his new resident. "But the vid I gave them showed that you ran out just after I smashed your friend into the wall."

The mech shifted his glare at the tan and gray mech, who just crossed his arms over his chassis in response.

"Sneaky. If I didn't know better, I would say you wanted something from me." Tilting his helm to the side, the energon rushing to his helm was starting to make his processor ache, the mech tried to nettle the bot holding him hostage. "Or you could be one of those twisted freaks that get off by hurting their partners."

Nitro grinned internally as the mech tried a few other statements in order to get a rise out of him. That hadn't been a bad attempt, and if he knew what he was talking about it probably would have worked better. After a few other digs that didn't even get the Praxian's tan door-wings to twitch, the mech fell into a sullen silence.

The SPARTAN demolitions specialist waited a few moments before finally asking a question. "So… what's your designation?"

"…you're joking, right?" The silver and blue mech raised, or rather lowered, an optic ridge at the question. The tan and gray Praxian just looked at him with a blank faceplate, waiting for an answer. "'M Axel, why?"

"Cause that's all I need to know. Hang around a bit, Axel. I'll get back to you later." Nitro gave a low chuckle as the mech started up swearing at his back.

\V/

Clearsight carefully slipped an external drive out of her subspace and copied the data she had compiled on the subject that Shadowdancer wanted looked into. As the terminal she was using processed her request, the scout looked around at the empty Hall of Records, keeping an optic out for any bot sneaking around when they shouldn't be just like she was doing.

A quiet beep informed her that the data had been copied and she was free to remove the device. She snatched the drive and snuck her way out of the Hall, avoiding the security cameras with her stealth system.

On her walk home, she thought about why she was out at this time of the cycle.

The whole slinking around thing could have been avoided if she wanted to explain why she wanted the information to the superiors she sometimes worked for, but since she couldn't find a way to explain why she needed the information without having some bot look up either Holdout or Shadowdancer to see why they wanted to know, the SPARTAN scout had to resort to less than legal means of acquiring the data.

For some odd reason, the data files linked to the Quintessons had been locked under more than just a few security measures, requiring bots that wanted to look up the subject to report to the bots that ran the Hall in person. The general information about the strange and apparently half organic race was available to any bot, the files containing anything else about the race was almost locked away on a separate server entirely.

Apparently, the information was on the restricted server, but it amounted to the same ideal.

Not that Clearsight wanted any reason to be looked at suspiciously, but the orders handed down had been clear. Find any information on the subject, and if even some of it matched up with what the XO had speculated she was to get the information any way she could and send it off to Knightblade.

Admittedly, the subject matter gave the scout the creeps when she stopped to think about what she was looking into.

What little they knew about the Forerunners in the Milky Way Galaxy and what she dug up about the Quintessons in this galaxy didn't seem like they matched up in any manner, but the range of time when they were active in both galaxies did correlate in a small window of overlapping time. The Forerunners had just been on the losing edge of their conflict with the Flood when the Quintessons first showed up in the annals of Cybertron's history as a primarily organic race.

The Forerunners had been peaceful in a way, self-imposed guardians and guides to the still developing races that they had tagged as intelligent. Even the method of their extinction was noble in a way, to wipe out every bit of sentient organic life that the Flood could use in order to trap the parasitic race before reseeding the entire galaxy with the ARK Instillation could be seen as self-sacrificing.

Rather self-destructive, but somewhat noble.

The Quintessons, on the other hand, where a race of once-organic creatures that started to manufacture large numbers of the early Cybertronians for two reasons; personal household slaves to serve them and military units to protect themselves from something that seemed to terrify the Quintessons.

Both races were active in an age long ago, the precise dates lost to the scout as she didn't know when the Forerunners had been active and couldn't use that as a point of research.

Shadowdancer, after that first battle that they fought for the Autobots, had speculated that this Quintesson race could be a twisted off branch of the Forerunners that ran away in cowardice when the Flood became an overwhelming threat to the organic species. Such events had happened throughout the history of the human race, and it stood to reason that even the most noble of races would have some cowards seeding the lot.

None of the other officers of the SPARTAN-Bots, namely Warcry and Holdout, were very comfortable with the suggestion after the XO had shared it. Markmaker had proposed having one of them look into it, but Holdout had argued that none of them were in position to do so, so the task fell to another.

Namely her, as a data clerk Clearsight had access to a lot of data and could explain away any interest as simple curiosity.

The Praxian femme had no theory on why the Quintessons seemed to be so different from every mention of the Forerunners the SPARTAN knew of, leaving it to Clearsight to find out if the theory was true and find a reason for the differences. The scout had spent more than a few cycles on the subject, finally unearthing some ancient files that speculated on the possible sanity of the then techno-organic race.

She had the feeling of a voyeur as she looked up everything about the race that had manufactured the early Cybertronians as either personal slaves or military units. The files made mention that the Quintessons that had survived the Cybertronian uprising, the period of time when the terms 'Autobot' and 'Decepticon' had been first used to describe the differences between the household bots and the military bots, seemed to be paranoid and frequently searching for the guilty.

Guilty of what the bots that originally wrote the files couldn't or wouldn't speculate on.

When the scout had reported in with what she had learned to nearly all officers' meeting across the Praxian's data uplink, Spotter and Clearsight were the only noncommissioned officers that had been in on that meeting, Shadowdancer finally decided to expand the scope of the investigation.

What the SPARTAN tactician was looking for was still unknown, but in some more uncharitable moments the scout speculated that the Praxian had some kind of complex about the whole thing, blaming something that another race did they couldn't have helped on the race that was noted to be some kind of successor. Clearsight usually got over those moments rather fast.

Flipping the external drive through her knuckle joints, the scout took the last turn to her rented flat in Ankmoor's residential section nearly in the middle of the city. She had three joors to mail off the device to Knightblade and leave for work back at the Hall of Records.

If she wanted to squeeze in her early cycle fuel she would have to hurry.

\V/

On his late cycle break, the tank framed Enforcer in Vos took his time wandering in and out of oil bars and energon cafés next to the seekers' Youth Section and the ground based part of the Aero Space Division Headquarters.

Markmaker had been sticking to a similar routine during his off shifts ever since Silentforce reported the seekers as the bots that deactivated the older Prime. Not that any of the SPARTANs really liked Sentinel, but the mech had his uses and the loss was affecting the competence of the Autobots as a whole.

Optimus wasn't a politician, and it showed in his work with the councils of the varied city/states. The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots wondered how Warcry was handling Optimus' new position as the only Prime in the ranks, as the other tank framed SPARTAN had more experience with data work of managing the deployments of SPARTANs than the honest work of managing a planet wide military force and the expected friction with the civilian sections that caused.

With a rueful chuckle, the Enforcer finally picked a bar to take in his fuel in, nodding to the vaguely familiar mech that was serving as bartender as he took a seat. Since Markmaker was frequently assigned patrol routes that took him close to the areas of the city that mostly held the seekers, he was accepted nearly everywhere in the sections that accommodated to seeker framed Cybertronians.

The impression most bots got when meeting the tank was of a laid back mech, one that was more amused that you wanted to speak with him than anything. The easy going personality made him the best mech on the force to deal with the frequently flighty seeker builds, since the tank could spend joors on end in their company piecing together what had caused the seekers to seek him out in the first place.

Markmaker's rueful grin widened as he thought about what the same bots that complimented him on his ability to hold onto his good nature would think about the slight fact he was a purpose built war tank with enough fire power to wipe out most of the city by himself.

Finally getting around to ordering a cube of energon, the SPARTAN mech didn't drink high-grade even if he wasn't on duty because he was the preferred one to take seeker calls and the bots on dispatch duty seemed to always know when he was free, he started to look around the bar he had only been in once or twice before. A good half of the bots inside of the bar were seekers, a few which knew him and gave the Enforcer a respectful nod of recognition. The other half were bots that had just stopped in for fuel like him and the few that helped whoever owned the bar keep it running.

The tank framed mech had a few breems of bot watching before some bot finally took the seat next to him at the bar.

The seeker framed femme was seated on his left, and while that alone wouldn't attract Markmaker's attention or give him a feeling of unease, the small fact of the matter was that she was inspecting the SPARTAN symbol painted on his arm plates a bit too closely for the SPARTAN trained mech to feel comfortable. "See something you like?"

Her optics darted up to his and then back to his arm. She hesitated a moment before bringing up one of her clawed digits up to trace the design.

"What is this?" The seeker femme apparently decided not to respond to the Enforcer's suggestion and concentrate on why she had took a seat next to the tank.

"Why do you want to know?" Warcry had vetoed the idea to hide the SPARTAN symbol, the silver eagle with wings spread under a gold star with gold arrows and lightning bolts grasped in its claws stood out easily against the gunmetal gray of the tank's armor plate paint. The SPARTANs had agreed not to cover it up, but nothing had been stated about whether or not to outright state what the symbol meant.

She pursed her lip plates. While that had not been a straight out dismissal, it wasn't what she wanted either. "I'm looking for a dark blue seeker with the same design painted on his wing panel."

Markmaker let out a laugh that startled her. "Drax? Why in the _Pits_ are you looking for him?"

"It's seeker business." She informed him haughtily, giving off a burst of white noise that made up a seeker scoff to reinforce that statement.

"Fine femme, hold your turbines and stop that. You're going to give me a processor ache trying to listen to that noise." The tank shook his helm and glared at her until she lost the frequency of her turbines' in surprise. This was only the second ground bound bot she had met who had any idea what the noise meant. "Can I have your designation to pass off to him, or are you going to give me an attitude about that as well?"

"Uh… I'm Dawnglider." She stared at the tank as he nodded and sipped his cube again. "Well?"

"Drax and his trine are almost on the other side of Cybertron at the moment, give us a breem." At her confused look, the SPARTAN mech tried to explain. "There's this relay of bots that transmit messages in a secure method. From here it starts with me, goes through a femme in Central named Holdout, from her it goes to a mech in Yuss named Quickgrip before Spotter can get it. Spotter takes it to his trine leader, and then a message has to go back the same way."

Markmaker took another sip of his cube as the two waited silently.

"He wants to know why." The tank smirked as she jumped a bit at the sudden statement.

"Oh… umm, it has to do with Starscream, the third seeker of the trine assigned to Sentinel Prime before Kaon."

Dawnglider fidgeted with her wings for a moment before pressing on, most of the seekers still were uneasy about the fact that it had been a seeker trine that betrayed the Autobots. The seeker council wouldn't care if some ground bound bots were told as long as a message got to the strangely acting trine that didn't check in at all, right?

"And what he wants to do as the so called 'Supreme' Air Commander. Since this… uh, Drax seeker was the one to take down Thunderstrike since he was supposed to be the next Air Commander by supremacy in combat, but since he hasn't reported in to the Aero Space Division for orders, Starscream is trying to take the title by default."

The SPARTAN 2IC barely suppressed the inclination to start laughing. "I don't think Drax or the others in his trine ever reported to an Aero Space Division before."

He passed on the message anyways, knowing that all three seekers in the SPARTAN trine held a bit of a grudge against Starscream, if he _was_ the last seeker that Tigerstripe missed.

Fidgeting a bit more in her seat, the seeker femme almost squeaked when the tank framed mech nodded suddenly.

"Drax said they'll come by sometime soon. When he gets here, I'm supposed to direct him to the Aero Space Division HQ, right?"

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" Dawnglider threw her arms around Markmaker, making the SPARTAN mech twitch in surprise. "Yes, the seeker entrance. Just have him ask for me, and his trine should show up with him."

She sat back in her chair, wings vibrating with excitement.

"He was a hard mech to track down, and risking a leak through you paid off." Slipping off the chair and back on her pedes, Dawnglider looked back to him with a smile. "Thank you again, officer. I'll be sure to mention that you were the one to help me this cycle to the council."

As she left the bar altogether, Markmaker had to chuckle. Unlike the SPARTAN seeker trine, she still had the hopping gait of a seeker abusing her anti-gravity thrusters. He wondered how exactly that meeting was going to go.

\V/

As Rook was cleaning up after her last class of the cycle, she had to bite back a fond smile as Bluestreak's hopeful faceplate popped into her view. "Sorry, Blue'. I have errands to run later, so I can't hang out this cycle. Next one I will definitely come with."

"Aw."

The merchant tried to give her a pout, but the saboteur was already on her way out the door.

"Hey, wait!" The gray femme gave him a look over her shoulder as she held the door open so he could leave. "What are you doing? Can I come with?"

"I'm afraid not, Blue. My errands will take a little while, but I promised _my_ brother that I would look into something for him." Rook steered the merchant on when Bluestreak looked like he was going to stall in the doorway. "Why are you so insistent to come with? It will be mostly boring, trust me."

The gray Praxian kicked at the ground as the femme locked up her dojo. "Cause your always running errands now. It's been a whole megacycle since you came with me and hung out with Smokey and me."

Rook smirked as she threw an arm across the younger mech's shoulders.

"Like I said, 'm sorry Blue. But this can't be pushed off any farther than I have already." She held up the hand not on the other side of the merchant when he opened his mouth components. "No, I'm not mad at Smokey again, none of Blaster's cassettes have done something to annoy me, and yes I'm sure I can't push this off again. Next cycle, promise."

The mech gave her a beseeching stare, but Rook chuckled and hugged him with one arm before setting off. She felt the slight magnetization of her back plate as the merchant tried to stealthily attach a tracking chip to her lower back.

With a smirk, the saboteur slowed down behind him and casually reached back and slid the chip off, flicking it so it would attach to one of the bum bots that had attended her class that cycle.

(ooo000ooo)

Bluestreak cautiously looked into the main floor of the living unit he shared with his brother. Smokescreen was glaring at the back of Blaster's helm as the communications expert fiddled with something on the desk. "I take it that it didn't work again."

The diversionary tactician gave his brother a glare as he stalked out. Blaster smirked at the back of his Praxian partner. "Nope. Rook found it in less than a breem, and tagged some homeless bot with the tracker. Nice try Blue."

Ramhorn and Steeljaw, under the desk the communications specialist was working on, both snorted in disgust. Smokescreen had been trying to attach a tracking chip to the gray femme for the last few megacycles, trying to keep an optic on her movements in the city.

Unfortunately for them, Rook was better at finding the tracking chips than they were at putting them on her.

Fortunately, she was more amused at the breach of her privacy than annoyed.

Bluestreak nearly blew a gasket at first when Rook told him offhandedly that he should inform his brother that the chip for that cycle seemed defective somehow, and the merchant cornered his Enforcer brother about what he was trying to do.

Somehow between then and now, it had become more of a game between the four bots and four cassettes. They would try to stick the femme with a chip, and she had a joor to find it and tag another bot with it. It had surprised the two Enforcers and the merchant that if Rook couldn't find it in a joor she would let the chip stay on for the cycle. That had only happened once so far, back _before_ it had become a game to them.

For some odd reason, that cycle the femme's tracker signal had wandered around the slums district, only occasionally wandering off in different directions every so often. Why, Rook hadn't told them. The only comment she ever made about the whole affair was that 'it is so on now', when she had first clued in on the reason behind the tracker chips.

Bluestreak often wondered if Rook was trying to keep Smokescreen's attention. Blaster agreed with his theory, but his brother was less than happy about that turn of processing. "Well, she said she could hang out with us next cycle. Whose turn is it?"

"Smokey's, then me." Steeljaw low crawled his way out from under the orange and black mech's chair. "I'm at one, the rest of you still have none."

"Yeah, yeah. Rub it in why don't you." Blaster leaned back so that only two of the chair legs reached the ground. "That femme's got skill."

\V/

Perceptor gave Knightblade a small shipping container when the sniper finally showed up in the main room of the scientist's living unit for her early cycle rations. "I believe Clearsight, her involvement is speculated based on the location of the sender, has directed this object to your care."

"In other words, I have mail."

The blue gray femme smirked at the huff that came from her employer. Picking on the articulate scientist's vocabulary and method of speech was one of her favorite pass times when they were not up to their elbow joints with a project or two.

Opening one end of the container and tipping it, the sniper's optic ridges drew together as an external drive slid into her hand. "Huh. Well, that's weird, not even a note or anything."

Looking over the sniper's shoulder plates, Perceptor deftly slid the external drive out of her hands and took the few steps to a personal terminal on the wall. "One would perceive that the receiver has prior familiarity about what the sender has sent."

He connected the device and took a sip of his own cube as the two waited for it to upload.

The sniper snorted. "I haven't heard a word of this before. That worries me more than the fact Clear' found a good reason to send me this."

She finally picked up her own cube and watched the vid screen as the terminal scanned the drive for any virus before displaying the contents.

"Some files about 'Quintessons' and these files . . ." Knightblade accessed the files that had tags showing that they came from the _ATHENS_ ' library. In response to her prompt, the bare amount of Intel that the humans had compiled on the Forerunner race pulled up to the display vid screen. "The _Forerunners?_ What the slag?"

She moved that file out of the way so she could see what else was on the drive. Skimming the short list, the sniper was amused to see that the scout had sent some secured files that obviously came from a Hall of Records in her city, she pulled up the shortest file, one labeled 'Directives'.

Knightblade set aside her untouched cube of energon as she read the XO's speculation.

"Fascinating theory," Perceptor had read the message over her shoulder, which included Shadowdancer's original musing, the orders Holdout had given in Clearsight's search for information, and the preliminary results of the scout's work, "but additional supplementary information is necessary before any decisive opinion is possible. Who are the individuals known as the Forerunners?"

"Are you just going to hang around up there, or are we going to work this cycle?" Knightblade snatched the drive out of the terminal's data port before stomping off for the in suite wash rack.

The scientist blinked after her, more surprised at the sudden show of temper than her pointed, half concealed suggestion that looking over a bot's shoulder plating was rude. This was the first time ever in their nearly half a vorn's association that the femme had shown even the suggestion of a temper, besides that first violent meeting between the two.

Somehow that was more reassuring to the scientist than the lack of aggressiveness that the femme normally gave off when the scientist kept the company of bots she didn't know. He looked down at the untouched cube of energon that the sniper hadn't done more than lift up, then back to the wash rack where he could hear the cleaners splashing around.

With a wry twist to his lip plates, the mech set down his own half-finished cube and looked into the terminal's history bank to see if it had temporarily saved the contents of that external drive.

Something about the data was upsetting his assistant, and he wanted to know what.

\V/

Silentforce winced as Refit poked around the hole in his neck cables where his vocalizer used to be.

"You were lucky with this, you know."

The medic in training blissfully ignored Holdout's snickering in the background as she ran yet another pass of her medical scanners over the still strained vocal systems of the mech's, the tracker had refused to explain why she would laugh when the younger femme fussed over their silent brother, and continued in the same tone that the medic instructors had informed her class was reassuring to the injured when being repaired.

"If you had put any more stress on that faulty bit of hardware, you would have melted a few of these wires and circuits, which would have been nearly impossible to fix outside of a very competent medic or a medical facility. Getting you admitted as something other than a war bot so the qualified medics could work on you would have been a processor ache and a half." Refit sounded disgusted as she rambled, the idea that some medics would refused to repair bots built expressly for war was distasteful to the SPARTAN's only medically inclined bot on the roster.

The SPARTANs hadn't chosen to be what they were, but as long as they were needed none of them would ever consider a reformat into a more normal Cybertronian frame.

: _Yes, I know. You and Ratchet have already reamed me out for this before, remember._ : The defensive specialist gripped the underside of the couch as the SPARTAN medic's finger tips traced each wire, feeling out any shorts or melted sections that would need to be replaced in the areas that Refit's student medic's scanning equipment could not reach. : _I believe Ratchet also said a few things that are not best repeated in polite company as well about the overall state of my vocal systems. It can't be that bad, right? It didn't hurt until the slagging thing shorted out on me._ :

He fought back the desire to twitch that Refit was causing him, the tickling sensation brought on by the feel of another bot's fingertips on his vocal wires made the SPARTAN want to attempt to pull away from the medic in training's hands. He knew better, though. She would just smack him upside the helm before continuing in a more forceful manner, one that would probably not tickle.

"It didn't hurt you because you're all desensitized to minor pains by now." The femme who had once been a human made AI sat back on her heel stabilizers, sitting almost on her skid plate and at the mech's pedes.

She insisted it was the best position to inspect slow auto-repair of the incomplete and damaged system, as she had the light from a nearby floor lamp and an unobstructed view up into Silentforce's neck cabling.

"Do you know how often normal Cybertronians visit the medics? Once or twice a decacycle a normal Cybertronian visits the medical stations regularly for a system check; a basic look over for leaky lines, cracked support struts, and checks on the state of lubricants and fluids. Once a stellar cycle they go in for a complete maintains check of _all_ of their systems. That's not counting any emergencies or stopping by for anti-viral software upgrades."

Silentforce raised an optic ridge and nodded slowly, not too sure what point the medic in training was trying to make. Refit pulled a face at the SPARTAN mech as she stood up, hands on her hip joints in a frightening parody of both Ratchet and Shadowdancer, and prepared herself to yell at the mech until he understood.

Holdout got to her pedes quick when the ex-AI took up that particular stance.

"It's almost time for us to leave for the cycle, 'fit. Let him think that out while we go." The tracker made enough fuss to distract the still easily diverted femme from what she had been doing. : _I hope you know what she's angling for, three-three-seven, cause I don't._ :

With a grimace at the femme, who just gave him a small smile back, the defensive specialist mentally compared the rate of system checks so called 'normal' Cybertronians got against the checks he had gotten in Kaon.

He could see the former AI's point, given that the SPARTANs tended to avoid medics and the like as bots that could out them as war bots, none of the SPARTANs ever did more at a medical station than hurry past it.

What he didn't know, was what she expected him to do about it.

(ooo000ooo)

In between classes at the Cybertronian Academy, the student body liked to drift into the quad to socialize or to the Hall of Records to study. The quad was a courtyard of benches and tables that were open to the sky and the Hall of Records had every bit of information that any bot would ever need to know.

Refit like to split her free time between researching more about the Cybertronian physical form and errors or malfunctions that were common and sitting in the quad and watching the bots that passed her by.

This current cycle saw the former AI sitting in a dim corner of the Hall of Records, looking at the cases of data pads and servers that made up the west side of the Hall.

By tradition, the west side held the data files that pertained to Cybertron as of now, the east side held the files of past ages. North had files on alien worlds and species, south dealt with scientific theories and the supporting evidence.

The slim SPARTAN femme was looking for something a bit different, having thoroughly depressed herself in looking into common maladies of sparklings and younglings for the XO. Apparently if Shadowdancer had refused to take in Kynaite, there could have been severe consequences, such as the sparkling could have become withdrawn and refused to accept another bot as either a Guardian or Caretaker or he could have shut down and died.

The thought that the little mischievous little sparkling that she had met when the XO had escorted Silentforce to Central could have suffered such a thing was enough to make the femme wonder if Cybertronians could cry like the humans could.

Wandering the files that contained works of fiction, she was amused to note that Cybertronians had about as much of the data cases and servers dedicated to that as any human University Library, Refit traced her finger joints over the data pads neatly sorted on the shelves while trying to decide on if she should check one or two out.

Not really watching where she was going, the SPARTAN's medic in training turned a corner to see the other side of the data case and promptly ran into some bot's chest plates and was knocked back onto her skid plate. Scrambling up to her knee joints, she almost started to babble apologies but was beaten to it.

"I'm so sorry, femme. I was trying to find this bot named Refit, and wasn't watching where I was going." The bright blue painted mech held out a hand, giving the femme a concerned look when she gaped at him. "Are you alright?"

"Err… yes. Umm, I'm Refit." Giving the mech a sheepish smile, the tan and black femme grabbed his hand and let him pull her to her pedes.

He blinked at her in surprise before grinning. "Well, lucky me. I'm Jolt, and the instructors told me to tell you that you have a package from Ratchet, the Head Medic of Iacon."

Refit smiled brilliantly, more than happy that the replacement part that Silentforce needed was in, and took a step forward only to realize that Jolt had failed to release her hand. She tugged herself free before he remembered.

"Sorry, but umm…" He walked with her out of the hall, casting a quick glace around before finishing his statement, "…why do you have a package from the Autobots?"

"What makes you sure it's from the Autobots?" Refit gave the bright blue mech a sidelong glance as they made their way down the halls to the administrative wing of the Academy.

Jolt snorted at her. "Ratchet's an Autobot; he wasn't exactly quiet when he joined up."

He slowed down when the offices came into the two's view, mildly pleased when the femme slowed her pace as well.

"So… can you answer, or is it some big secret?"

The ex-AI concealed her smirk at the wistful tone of the mech's vocalizer and turned to face him when they both slowed to a stop. "It's a replacement vocalizer module for my brother. His shorted out and he needs a new one."

A raised optic ridge was all that he did in response to her statement.

"It's true!"

"Then why not get a part ordered from a manufactory somewhere? You're getting one from one of the highest respected medics on Cybertron." Jolt gave the suddenly sheepish looking femme a frown. "In that case, why not get the manufacturer that made his in the first place send him a new one?"

Refit opened and closed her mouth components a few times before she could even think up an excuse.

"It… uh… that factory no longer exists, too many faulty parts." She looked around a bit desperately before all but bolting for the office door. "Sides, Ratchet is a kinda family friend. He was just… um, concerned. That's all. Bye Jolt! It was nice to meet you!"

(ooo000ooo)

Refit got the rest of the orn off, the half true story about her package being from a concerned family friend made her medical instructors sympathetic to her 'brother's' plight. They promised to send another training medic along to her living unit with the work she would miss.

Holdout expressed some concern about the ex-AI walking home by herself, but Silentforce agreed to meet her halfway to keep the tracker from worrying more than she should.

Wheeljack had gamely made up another armor set for the defensive specialist, and the very hefty package the inventor sent along to Holdout's work address nearly made Sandstorm tail the femme home. Half of the mech actually wanted to help the tracker with the heavy load and half of him wanted to know what it was for.

The SPARTAN femme had to resort to some of the more creative threats she had heard the XO make in order to get the Wrecker to back off that orn.

That had meant that Silentforce was no longer stuck in the half destroyed armor plates that survived his near deactivation in Kaon, and sporting a new coat of paint ensured he didn't stand out as he walked the streets on Refit's normal route to and from the Academy.

Refit had one hand gripping the package Ratchet had sent to her, the other perusing a data pad as she wove her way through the mid cycle traffic when Silentforce spotted her tan and black frame. With an amused smirk, the mech took up a position that would result in the ex-AI blundering into him.

Three steps away, Refit stopped short and smirked up to her 'brother'. "Sorry, 'force. But I have already run into the required number of bots for the megacycle."

Snorting, Silentforce steered the slighter femme on down the crowded street to reach a back way to the tracker's home.

: _That's not really an awe inspiring thought._ : He gave the package in the medic in training's hands a long look as the two walked back to the living unit they all shared. : _So… that's it?_ :

"Yep, Ratchet made this one up himself." She turned the shipping container over and listened to the muffle clink as the contents turned over.

: _You do realize that this may not be the only malfunction wrong with me, right?_ : Silentforce gave both the package and the medic a sideways look as he reached for the door controls.

Refit huffed at him as he unlocked the living unit. "If it was, I would be surprised. A simple, even completely, malfunctioning vocalizer shouldn't have shorted out like that."

Following the defensive specialist into the flat, she set the package on the only table in the main room as walked to her room and pointed at the couch.

"Sit. I'll be right back."

Smirking at the medic's tone, he sat where she pointed. A few breems of listening to her rummage around for her own medical tools that all the SPARTANs had chipped in for, and she eventually came back into the main room with a few screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, some clamps, and wire cutters and set them next to him.

"Okay, given the directions that Ratchet sent along with it, this will not be pleasant."

: _I refuse to be pulled offline._ :

She flapped a hand at him as she started to pull the shipping container apart. "Not like I was expecting anything else, but splicing the wires will feel like… I really have no idea what it will feel like, but I'm sure it's not going to be good."

The mech raised an optic ridge as she finally pulled the new vocalizer module out and set it next the tools before reaching a hand in for the extra lengths of wire in the same gauge as the other SPARTANs had their own vocal systems wired with.

"So, that being the case, any idea on what you want to do now? Shadow' said it was your choice."

: _It's more like three-four-one gave me a list and told me to pick something._ : His systems hiccupped, much to her amusement, as the femme reached in and began to snip out some wires. : _I've got the option of helping another SPARTAN, or enlisting as an Autobot early. She even said that if I wanted to I could help out with the Covert Ops team, excluding one-nine-six since he's now in Kaon._ :

Silentforce gave a wary look at the number of wires Refit would have to splice to hook the new part into his systems.

: _I think I'm going to go help out zero-four-six. Ratchet can't still be torqued with me, right?_ :

"Yeah… good luck with that." Putting down the cutters next to her and sitting much like she had earlier in the cycle, she picked up the new vocalizer and the few nuts and bolts that would hold it in place. Delicately setting the new part in place, she slotted the bolts home and loosely screwed on the nuts. One of her medical upgrades included some basic tools in her finger joints, and she used them to tighten the nuts in place. "Right, here's the second part that's going to suck slag."

She took up the new lengths of wires, which on closer inspection showed that one end was already attached to the connectors that would link the new vocalizer to his vocal system, and used the cutters again to shorten them to more manageable lengths.

: _What else is new?_ :

The two fell into silence as the medic in training attached and spliced the wires in. As Refit was finishing up with the final solders to seal the connectors into the vocalizer, the two could hear Holdout's voice from outside. "Who the _frag_ are you?"

"Err… I'm Jolt. Does… uh… Refit live with you?"

The former AI abandoned her work for the moment, the newly melted wires had to cool off before she could finish after all, and bolted to the door. When she hit the controls, she nearly groaned at the sight of both Sandstorm and Holdout giving the brightly painted blue mech a once over.

"Uh… hi Jolt! I didn't know they were going to send you… and so soon. Hold' this is… a friend from the Academy."

The tracker gave her a flat stare, not believing her but unwilling to start an argument over that when Sandstorm was still hanging over her shoulder.

"Right…" She looked back to her Wrecker suitor with a weak smile.

Both femmes had endeavored to keep the triple changer from discovering Silentforce's presence for different reasons. Holdout because she didn't want to deal with a jealous mech hanging around her all cycle; and Refit because she didn't want the tracker to put her pede down and flatly refuse to see the mech anymore.

"So, you were saying?"

Sandstorm brightened considerably at the sudden attention from the bronze and black femme. "Some of the other Wreckers are getting together at a bar, would you like to come with me?"

Even if femme normally turned him down on invites after their work shift, the Wrecker was nothing if not persistent.

: _Three-three-seven isn't able to move quickly at the moment, is he?_ : The tracker pursed her lip plates as she waited for the ex-AI to respond.

Refit was almost giddy as she replied, watching the orange and black mech stare at the SPARTAN femme hopefully. : _Nope. I'm only halfway done soldering the last connections into his systems._ :

"Well… sure, why not?" Holdout shrugged a bit uncomfortably. The things she did for her fellow SPARTANs. : _Tell him he owes me big for this._ :

Sandstorm had a big grin on his faceplate as he offered the femme of his dreams his arm. The bronze and black femme gave her 'younger sister' a stern look.

"Behave, and ensure you lock the doors after your… _friend_ , leaves." She pinned the bright blue mech with another glare. "You… I hear any complaints, and I will hunt you down and beat you with whatever is handy. Understood?"

She only took the Wrecker mech's arm after he nodded a bit too fast and let herself be led down the street.

Refit fought back the desire to trill as she watched the two disappear.

" _Finally_. I was starting to think that maybe Holdout preferred femmes." She had to snicker at the rather shocked look on Jolt's faceplate. "Oh, don't worry. Every bot I've met so far has had the same threat levied against them."

He blinked at her as she beckoned him to enter the flat. "She's scary. I've heard some rumors about a tracker femme that worked for the Autobots here as a supply bot and what she did to the last supply bot, was that her?"

If it was, Jolt was going to be on his best behavior. Ticking off a femme of that caliber would be like shooting himself in the pede.

"Erm… maybe? I really didn't ask about that when I moved in." Refit picked up the soldering tool she had dropped in her haste to save the mech from the unfriendly attentions of her protective 'sister'. "I do know she did get in trouble for violence against a civilian bot when Warcry visited not too long ago."

Jolt opened his mouth components to ask another question, only to snap his components shut when he got a good look at the mech that was still sitting on the couch. Silentforce raised an optic ridge at him as Refit knelt down to finish what she had been doing. "Who… err… Refit? What?"

Silentforce snorted as Refit carefully made the last adjustments to her work in his neck cables.

"I told you that package was for my brother, right? Well, meet my brother, Silentforce." She stood up and gave the seated mech a hopeful look. "Well?"

The red and black mech grimaced before shaking his helm. "No-t-t q-qu-i-i-t-te, 'fit-t-t."

The defensive specialist started to wonder who he fragged off to deserve this as he rubbed at the now scorched feeling radiating in his neck cables.

Refit's shoulder joints slumped at the static laced vocal response. "Well, at least you can talk again. Maybe Ratchet can fix the rest."

Jolt almost jumped when the mech responded over the public comms instead of trying his vocal system again.

 _:Possibly. Thank you for trying 'fit. Tell Hold' that I'm sorry I can't stay for a farewell, but clearing out before that mech stalker of hers gets back is the best I can do.:_ The mech patted the rather depressed medic in training on the helm before giving the still silent mech standing nearly in the doorway a glare of his own. _:You try anything, and I will come back just to beat you into scrap metal.:_

Like with the tracker, the defensive specialist only moved on when he regained enough processor power to nod franticly.

Silentforce left the flat, leaving two medics in training behind. Refit kicked despondently at one of the leftover lengths of wire before starting to clean up the mess she had made in attempting to fix the mech's vocal systems.

Sorting out her tools and the scraps of metal left over, she was mildly surprised to see blue painted servos gathering up the longer bits of wire in a neat bundle. Once the two had cleaned up the main room, Jolt looked over to where the tan and black femme was storing her tools and the more salvageable bits of wire.

"So… _can_ I ask, or is it something you would have to shoot me for after telling?"

Refit twisted her lip plates in a smirk. "There isn't any rule about asking, but I can't tell you a lot."

"Fair enough." He looked to the door where the red and black mech had disappeared to, then back to the slim femme. "About these siblings of yours…"


	12. Chapter 12

Knightblade looked up from the data pad she was reading to check on Perceptor's location again.

Wheeljack, sitting next to her in an attempt to avoid the mass of scientifically inclined bots that might want to lecture him about lab safety and the proper way to handle volatile objects, poked her between her side plates as she fidgeted in place again. "Really, Knight'. That's the fifth time in a breem you've lost you place. What's wrong?"

With another glance cast to where her scientifically inclined employer was chatting with a few other bots about something to do with a super nova and the expected energy yield, the sniper set the data pad down and gave the inventor a self-depreciating grin. "I really shouldn't tell you. Percy knows, but I think I wasn't supposed to let him know either."

"Well, this party isn't going to get miraculously less bland in the next joor or two, so out with it already." Wheeljack gave her an encouraging flash of green light before another thought hit home in his processor. "Wait, this isn't about something else going wrong with the project, is it?"

She suppressed a grimace at the terminology they were using for the copied All-Spark crafted system tests. Both the scientist and inventor found no problem calling the series of tests 'the project', and were more than a little confused on why the sniper refused to use the same term when referring to their work in the company of other bots.

Knightblade kept her hazy recollections of when she was a SPARTAN trainee, also called 'the project' when the instructors were deciding what to do for the day, to herself.

Currently the three were attending the début of another scientist's theorem for a space bridge, a solely theoretical method of transferring matter instantly, even across galactic distances.

This scientist friend of Perceptor would take his idea to the scientific council for funding before actually trying to prove that his idea would work, and had thrown his party when he was granted a hearing. It was partly to rub the olfactory sensors of his rivals into his work, and partly so that the scientists that usually lock themselves away in their labs got out to socialize every once and again.

As like Wheeljack said, it was rather bland to bots that actually got out of their reinforced laboratory walls once in a great while.

The inventor himself was watching the sniper that could hold the same position, even contorted ones, for cycles on end suddenly start twitching like she just developed a case of rust. His processor wandered back to when he had been pulled aside by Perceptor earlier that cycle and requested him to watch the femme to see if he could figure out what was wrong.

The articulate scientist had made some agreeing sound when his sniping assistant made some remark about washing up before they were expected, a few breems before the three left the older scientist's work space, and rounded on Wheeljack abruptly. "I have exhausted all supplementary possible approaches, and discovered that I must depend on your willingness to assist us, Wheeljack."

The inventor had blinked at the older mech for a moment before his processor caught up with his audio receptors.

"Eh, what?" How the scientist had phrased that made him think relationship problems at the moment, but the mech barreled on before he could ask for clarification.

"Something about a communiqué from one of her comrades has her dismayed, but I cannot find a reason for her distresses." When the Autobot just blinked at him some more as the conversation took a left turn to his poor and confused processor, Perceptor gave him a rather dark glare. "You must have observed the apathy that marks her typical methods of effort?"

"You mean; has she seemed a little off, yes." Wheeljack thought about it for a little longer. The sniper had seemed more than a little distracted over the last megacycle, a few minor mistakes that were common for any bot but uncommon for a SPARTAN with their heightened sense of situational awareness had caught his attention a few times.

He had figured the femme was not getting enough recharge at the time, but realized that was a pointless excuse for a bot that could go cycles without fuel or rest. After pondering it for a little while, he had to strike 'lack of energy' from what was bothering the SPARTAN because she didn't show any of the signs of neglecting her rarely need recharge cycles.

"But… what would one of the others send her that would distract her so badly?"

"I do not consider it was the intentional result. Rather, I theorize it is something that she finds personally conflicting with some facet of the information she was sent, and she declines to share the reasoning why there is a severe impression on her work with myself." Perceptor sounded frustrated and more than a little annoyed at his assistant.

Wheeljack had suppressed the desire to point out that he was acting like a jealous mech whose femme wandered off and didn't tell him where she was going, but he could see the older mech's point. In their line of work distractions could be deadly, and Knightblade's unwillingness to sound out her difficulty could cause problems later on.

He was forcibly brought back to the present when the femme in question tapped his arm. "You okay, 'jack?"

"Yeah, just thinking." The inventor raised an optic ridge at her questioning look. "So… what did I miss?"

She snorted as she waved a hand to the gathering of scientist. "Nothing really, just the same old, same old."

"Ah…" Wheeljack looked around at the milling bots, caught Perceptor giving him a frown, and turned back to the SPARTAN femme. ". . . so?"

When she just looked over curiously, abandoning the data pad as a lost cause, he waggled his optic ridges at her.

"What's wrong?"

Knightblade managed a weak giggle. "It's really silly."

She folded her frame over the table the two had rested their cubes of untouched high-grade on and set her helm on top of her ignored data pad.

"What seems silly to you probably won't seem silly to us, you know. There seems to be a world of difference between what we all see."

The bluish gray and black femme snorted again, but spoke anyways.

"There was this race of sentients, long before our original race started to explore the heavens, which set themselves up as guardians and guides of the less developed sentient races. This race, even if it was capable of brutality on their own, was the closest thing to a fairy tale, a sparkling's story that I remember from my original family unit before… well, _before_. They were archeologists, those that examined the past remains of civilizations and drew conclusions about how those ancient races behaved and lived. In my early function, I listened to stories about how they were benevolent and kind, how they built up and waged a war that even they were not sure about winning and sacrificed themselves to keep a tide of parasitical creatures that would have over run our galaxy and wiped us all out before we could defend ourselves. The human race was supposed to succeed them, there was speculation that we had been engineered just for that reason, and their left over technology called us the 'Reclaimers'."

Knightblade straightened up a bit in her seat and gave the inventor a small smile.

"There is some evidence that the race I looked up to as a sparkling might be related to the Quintessons. I have been asked by the XO to verify if that is true or not."

Wheeljack had opened his mouth components to ask if that meant she remembered her life before the SPARTAN Program, but shut them abruptly when she said 'Quintessons'.

Her small smile turned bitter. "Yeah, that's why I've been jittery."

"Well… that sucks _slag_."

"It's stupid of me." The inventor looked to her sharply, but the SPARTAN continued without looking at him. "Shadow's a good femme, one of the best tactical officers I've ever had the grace to work with. But when she suggested that the two might be just one it felt like she slapped me and kicked where it hurts just for good measure."

Wheeljack hummed in thought as she fell silent. "Can't you ask not to do it?"

"Why? There is no physical reason barring me from checking the data out." Knightblade drummed her finger tips on the table. "And refusing an assignment would be like turning my back on all the SPARTANs that came before me."

She huffed out a sigh as she leaned back in her chair.

"It's not going to kill me to check it out, 'jack."

"Well…"

"And before you say anything, no I will not dump it on you or Percy."

Snickering, the inventor nodded. "Wasn't going to insult you by asking, Knight'."

"Sure you weren't." She gave him a wry smile.

Wheeljack watched her as she started to fidget with her data pad again and gave a sigh of his own. This was going to be a long cycle.

\V/

Warcry tilted back his chair, bored beyond belief.

He was no stranger to paperwork, but Cybertronian data work was just as bad and was in even larger volumes to match the longer time measurements. The tank had volunteered himself in helping Optimus Prime in the sheer amount that he was now responsible for, and had made a sizable dent in the stacks of data pads waiting for the Prime.

However there was only for so long that the SPARTAN CO could tolerate sitting after getting back his ability to walk without going completely cracked.

Glaring at the pile that seemed to grow every breem even without bots dropping by to add to it, he decided he had worked enough for one cycle and got up to seek out the only other SPARTAN in the Autobot's Iacon base at the moment. Prowl gave the mech a sideways look as he passed by, refraining from remarking that the tank's shift wasn't over because the SPARTAN had already completed his own work and had started in on another's.

Warcry found Galeforce chatting amicably with Stonewall.

Most of the Stonewall Defenders guild bots had opted to join the Autobot ranks when they reached Iacon, and the old guild members were still together since Optimus accepted their allegiance with the condition that they retained their previous chain of command.

Stonewall was gradually adjusting to the life of an Autobot officer with only a few issues so far and his new, or rather old, Lieutenants Lithium and Steelbrace took to taking military orders even better than their old Guild Master.

"I thought the two of you had the off-cycle off?" The tank smirked as the ex-guild bot jumped, which widened at the almost disgusted look he got from his own subordinate.

Stonewall gave the oddly sneaky tank a dry glare. "As I am sure you know, however, Galeforce was in the middle of reassuring me that I am not mishandling my new… unit."

Translating over from a civilian protection guild to a military escort unit was giving the old Guild Master some difficulty, and he often sought out the other officers for advice. Because of the rumors surrounding the SPARTANs, he also looked to Galeforce as another source of information, as no bot except the high ranking bots of the Prime's own unit quite knew what the SPARTANs did before their arrival in Iacon.

"If you here just to get me to play a game with you because you're bored, it's not going to happen. Wait for 'force or ask one of the Autobots to play."

The old Guild Master blinked as he looked from one grinning tank of a mech to the nearly pouting engineer and back again. "Game?"

Warcry threw his heavy treaded arm across the shoulders of Stonewall as he lowered his vocalizer in a conspiring manner. "It's called basketball in some corners of… the galaxy. Gale' dislikes playing with me because I'm heavier than he is, and can cause some damage if he isn't wary."

"Don't you _dare_. You know what the XO would have to say to you if she knew you're going to teach another bot that game!" Galeforce rubbed his faceplate with both hands as he considered the mechacidal femme and her reaction to teaching others the games and pastimes taught to them by the human ODST to kill time between missions.

"As long as she isn't expected to play, she wouldn't care." The SPARTAN CO steered the barley slighter guild mech on with a grin. "Now, if I was teaching him to play Texas Hold 'Em, using the New Vegas rules, then I would have to hide for the sake of my own sorry function."

(ooo000ooo)

Galeforce only agreed to a few rounds, just to show the other unit commander the way the game of 'basketball' was played.

The two SPARTANs led the other mech to the city's outer wall, where they had set up a rough basketball court some time before and was showing him the half court and how the game was expected to play.

Stonewall also got a good idea as to why Galeforce had tried to refuse to play.

Trying to get pass the 'guard' of a mech that had a longer reach and outweighed you was nearly impossible without some unusual flexibility in one's frame. Two rounds into the game, the combat engineer was sporting some dents and scrapes while the tank had only a single dent from getting the slighter mech's elbow joint in his side.

"You know if you didn't whine so much, you might win on occasion." Warcry had a grin on his faceplate as he watched the engineer calmly dribble the ball of inflated rubber they used as the ball.

Stonewall hid a grin as he watched the two SPARTANs trade insults before continuing pass the 'only a few' rounds that Galeforce agreed to.

\V/

Silentforce gave the two mechs in front of him a long look.

The gold one on his right glared at him, but his silver counterpart huffed a bit at his continued silence. "Look, can you direct us to the barracks or not?"

When the SPARTAN mech inclined his helm in a positive response, the silver one looked at him expectantly, waiting for verbal directions.

The defensive specialist wondered what about catching a transport to Iacon seemed like a good idea before he left Central as the silver one made a rude noise at him and pulled out a data pad from his subspace. "Look, it's not that- hey!"

Silentforce snatched the pad out of the mech's hand and switched the display to a writing program. After a moment, before the silver mech could process that the red and black mech had stolen from him in such a blatant manner, the SPARTAN handed the altered datapad back.

Sideswipe blinked as he automatically took the pad back and read the changes the stoic mech had made. ' _Battle damage took out my vocalizer. Follow me when the transport stops and I'll show you where the barracks is'._

The front-liner sheepishly looked up to the resigned looking mech that he had almost added to his list of bots to prank for the silent treatment.

"Err, sorry about that." The silver mech tilted the pad so Sunstreaker could read what the red and black mech had written as well.

The 'battle damaged' mech in front of them shrugged in reply as the transport slowed to a stop, and beckoned for the two to follow him.

Prowl, waiting for the new recruits and transfers to the Autobot base, inclined his helm at the red and black SPARTAN getting off the transport, and then frowned at the metallic twins following in his wake. "If they are disturbing you, Silentforce, I do have the authority to send them to the brig."

Sideswipe was about to protest, he hadn't done anything yet, but the mech he and his brother were following held up a hand and shook his helm at the black and white Praxian.

"I see. Well, if they do disturb you be sure to let me know. I have heard of their so called 'reputation', and Optimus Prime does not tolerate fighting outside of the training halls." Prowl gave the twins a hard look, returned by the gold mech glaring back and the silver one's smirk before turning his attention back to the other new transfers to the base.

Silentforce nodded to the black and white tactician before starting off again, nearly making the two mechs following him scramble to keep up. The defensive specialist gave them both a raised optic ridge over his shoulder plate for the delay.

"Sorry," the silver one smirked at him as he kept up, "but that was a bit unusual. Never had a bot stick up for us before."

Slowing, the SPARTAN mech gave the silver mech his attention and kept his optic ridge raised.

Sideswipe shrugged at the mild look of curiosity he was getting from their guide. "I suppose we made a nuisance of ourselves. After a while, none of the others we were assigned to in a unit wanted anything to do with us."

Sunstreaker grumbled a few choice comments under the general audio range, but the red and black mech he and his twin were following started to laugh without the vocal component that usually went with. He was even more surprised when the mech snatched the data pad that Sideswipe failed to return to his subspace again.

Both twins looked down to read what the mech had written.

' _Haven't heard that one before. Remind me of it later so I can tell my CO.'_ Just after the two read the comment, Silentforce took the data pad back for a moment. _'Better idea. Come with me when I report and tell him yourself._ '

Sideswipe grinned, a sentiment echoed by his usually sullen twin. "Sure."

(ooo000ooo)

'Stealing' the ball from out of the tank's possession, Galeforce was thrown off by the arrival of a familiar red and black mech making his way to the improvised basketball half court. "Sup, stranger!"

Warcry looked over briefly as he stole the ball back and shoved the slighter mech forward with his shoulder. "Took you long enough. What was the hold up?"

The CO gave the now glaring combat engineer a grin as Galeforce picked himself up, balancing the basketball in one massive hand as the two waited for the newly returned defensive specialist's reply.

Sideswipe slowed as their guide picked up speed, giving his brother a faintly confused look. Sunstreaker just shrugged as he continued in the red and black mech's wake.

Silentforce waved a hand to the two other SPARTANs and gave his old Guild Master a respectful nod. { _AI couldn't fix my vocal system, but she did replace my vocalizer. She passed on that it might be another problem farther in that system, something else that might not have translated over completely._ }

"Pity." Galeforce frowned thoughtfully. "That could be it, given what happened to us."

"Wait, what?" Sideswipe looked from the red and black mech to the green and gray one. "I didn't pick anything up."

Stonewall gave his old subordinate a concerned look as he spoke up as well. "What happened?"

Warcry gave the three mechs a long look, before raising an optic ridge at Silentforce. The defensive specialist just shrugged back and the tank gave the non-SPARTANs a small smirk. "He just made a comment over our encrypted line, that's why you didn't hear anything. And what happened occurred a long time ago, and apparently damaged more than just 'force's components."

The old Guild Master blinked at the hesitant set of the three SPARTAN mechs' frames. He knew that meant he would get nothing more out of them, but he really wanted to know why Silentforce was sent off for half a vorn when he was still malfunctioning. Looking from the one mech he knew well to the two he only got to know recently, Stonewall decided to try and pry what happened out of them later.

"Right… Lit' contacted me with a request, and I need to go take care of that before she decides to hunt me down. Silentforce, good to see you again." The defensive specialist nodded in return. "I'll see you two later, War', Gale'."

Galeforce waited until the other mech was just out of sight before mocking his commander. "Yeah, he doesn't believe that."

"Mute it, you." The combat engineer dodged the basketball thrown at him by the tank and just grinned back before turning to pick up the crudely made rubber ball. Warcry just snorted at his subordinate as he turned to the two that Silentforce had brought with him. "So… what's your story?"

Sunstreaker grinned wickedly as he pointed to the red and black mech. "Well, he suggested that I tell you…"

\V/

Nitro idly tapped his finger tips on his counter as he waited for Spotter to get back to him about the mech he had concealed in the basement. Looking up when a flash of color caught his optic, the Praxian wasn't very surprised to see one of the Enforcers from a few orns ago let herself into his shop. "Can I help you?"

Calmly looking around at the repaired displays, Roulette took her time in approaching the Praxian shopkeeper. "Just checking up on you. Have you seen that second mech since you reopened?"

"Nope, but then again it's only been a few cycles." Which was true, he hadn't been down to see Axel in the last two orns. "I'll keep and optic out."

The Enforcer femme scrutinized the mech's relaxed manner; something about his behavior was throwing her off.

Usually when merchants had some bot attempt a robbery, they closed down shop for a few cycles and loitered outside of the nearest Enforcer Station to 'encourage' the investigations conducted into their cases. For some odd reason, this mech was seeming content in trusting the Enforcers to handle what they needed to without needing his presence to remind them that he was still waiting for a response.

"Sure… uh, we finally got the name of the mech that you… knocked offline." She stared at the Praxian, who just shrugged in response. "His designation is 'Copper', he and his partner are apparently some kind of bounty hunters."

That got her a reaction from the tan and gray Praxian. The merchant mech jerked upright and looked straight at her. "Seriously? What the _frag_ were a pair of bounty hunters doing in _my_ shop?"

"Copper claimed they were working for a client, one interested in a bot that has the same glyph that you wear on your arm." Roulette pointed to the silver and gold design on the mech's upper left arm plate. "That one."

Nitro blinked down at his arm, then looked up to the Enforcer femme with a sheepish grin. "Heh. A few of my siblings are Autobots, three in fact. We all have the same design there. That might be why they attacked me."

"That would have been nice to know before." Corner of her lip plates twitched in a smile of her own as she turned and sauntered to the door. "Keep your optics at half power for the next few cycles. We'll let that bounty hunter go in a megacycle; since he didn't really do much damage we can't hold him for long."

"Mkay, bye femme!" The SPARTAN mech waved as the Enforcer left his store. As soon as she was out of sight, the Praxian frowned at his SPARTAN symbol.

If he was getting attacked already in a _Neutral_ city, he hated to think of the problems that the XO and Orpheus were having with their own easily spotted symbols. Spotter would get back to him in a few joors about his unwilling guest, and he could at least interrogate his guest about why he was looking for him.

(ooo000ooo)

Still hanging upside down, Axel pinned his captor with a glare as soon as the Praxian walked into the windowless basement room. "There's this thing called 'basic rights' I'd like to introduce to you."

"Really." Nitro pulled his M6 out of his subspace and shot the chain holding the mech up. The bounty hunter hit the ground hard with a thud, cursing the Praxian to the Pit as he fell.

Axel twisted around to the limits that the chains around his hands let him, intent on at least kicking the mech that had held him captive for the last few cycles, only to come optic to barrel to a weapon he had never seen before. "Whoa! Wait up a moment, mech. Afore you shoot me, don't cha think it'd be a good idea to ask a few questions?"

The tan and black SPARTAN gave his uninvited guest a flat stare. "You are Axel, one of two bounty hunters hired by a Decepticon named Shockwave to locate a specific group of bots that he's interested in. You were told that this group of bots all used the same symbol to identify each other, the same one as the one on my left arm. Your orders included the capture and interrogation of at least two of the bots that fits the description you were given. You and your partner intended to blindside me and take me in as one of the bots you would interrogate."

The demolition specialist arched an optic ridge after a long, silent moment.

"Did I miss anything?"

The mech, legs still bound by the chains looped and locked around his pedes, whistled appreciatively and sat up when the Praxian was done listing off what he knew. "You're good. How long did it take you to dig that up?"

"Not long. You know, you really shouldn't use public terminals when setting up these little 'jobs' of yours." Nitro crouched down to look the other mech in the optics. "Is there anything you can think of that I might have missed?"

"A few, but then, you already knew that. Didn't cha?"

Nitro gave him a gamin grin. "Well, of course. Why else would I've not shot you when I had the chance?"

Axel snorted as he wiggled a bit to get comfortable, tugging on the chains still attached to the floor. "I gotta hand it you ya, you're really good. So, a standard trade then?"

"Maybe." Standing up to his full height, the Praxian took a seat on one of the leftover creates from one of his shipments. "See, that's what I was thinking, a trade of information for your freedom, but one of my superior officers nixed that idea. Thing is, we haven't been active on Cybertron for very long, and she wants to know why Shockwave is so intent on us."

"That would make you military bots then, right? If you're reporting to an officer." The bounty hunter smirked for a moment, only to frown when what the Praxian told him sank in. "She ain't insisting you kill me, is she?"

"No, she isn't." Nitro smirked back at the wary look still on the mech's faceplate. "She wanted to see you herself, but she's busy at the moment. So that leaves me, and I'm not qualified to be _that_ type of an interrogator. So, I have some leeway for this, but not a whole lot. The only way you're going to get out of seeing any of the bots that specialize in that field is by cooperating with me."

Axel scowled at the smirking Praxian. "That's if I believe you, mech. I could just wait you out; eventually you'll get tired of my charming company and toss me out on my skid plating."

The SPARTAN inclined his helm. "You could. Then again, I could just shoot you and get it over with."

"Ouch, mech. I'm hurt that you can think that way, after everything we've been through."

Nitro's laughter surprised the mech.

"It would be a pity," agreed the still snickering demolitions specialist, "but we'll always have my storefront to remember each other by."

Axel further surprised himself by snorting in amusement.

"Good times." The bounty hunter ruefully shook his helm, mildly surprised that the mech had a sense of humor as dry as his own. "So, since we're to be roomies, can I have your name?"

The tan and black Praxian got to his pedes and gave the still bound mech a mocking bow. "Nitro, SPARTAN-Bot demolitions specialist. You need it gone, I can blow it up."

"…frag me. We really hit the jack-pot with you, didn't we?"

Nitro shrugged as he took a seat again on the same create. "Depends, where else have you pinned us to be?"

"Well," Axel gave his jailor a long look before deciding that being honest wouldn't kill him, yet anyways, "some rumors are popping up about you bots in Praxus, Polyhex, Crystal City, and Yuss."

"The saboteur, the assassin, the sniper, and the close-quarters weapons specialist," ticking off the job classes held by the SPARTANs' in those cities, Nitro had to grin at the shocked look on the bounty hunter's faceplate, "real good options there, Axel. You might as well just gone ahead and shot yourself to save us the trouble."

The bound mech snorted in disgust. "You're all not worth the five thousand credits we were going to get paid for this job. We should've charged extra for hazard pay."

"That's it? Damn, you got robbed." Grin growing into a smirk at the disgusted look thrown at him, the Praxian shook his helm as he got up. "I think I'm going to like you, Axel. In that case, why don't I give you a better deal? We've been looking into a few bots, and your help could be just the break we've been looking for."

"I do have to tell Shockwave something, if that fragging partner of mine hasn't tried to sell me out, anyways."

"That's fine. In fact, if you tell him what I tell you, we'll even pay you for that." Nitro smirked at Axel's look of disbelief. "Once I've decided we can trust you, that is."

The bounty hunter gave a hollow sounding laugh. "There would be the catch I was waiting for."

\V/

Orpheus barely contained a wince as his opponent swung a solid hit to his midsection. Turning slightly to the left to guide the bot's follow though, he returned the punch in the bot's neck cable, using the opportunity to rip out a few important wires as well.

His latest opponent went down in a howling pile of bent metal and mashed gears and the assassin stalked off to try and assess how much damage this bout had earned him.

Even if the SPARTANs had a short lived shielding, they couldn't use them in fights that could be observed or watched as they were trying to pass as civilian bots, making it harder for the SPARTANs to conceal their augmented frames and abilities. Even the slightest misstep could result in some arena owner or a concerned fan calling in the medics, and all it would take was one full medical scan to out the SPARTANs as war bots.

Stalking through the halls of the latest arena that the SPARTAN mech had taken to fighting in, Orpheus ducked into an unused lodge room to check the minor amounts of dents and scrapes that he had earned that cycle. Besides some leaking oil and the expected scrapes on his paint job, the damage was minor enough to risk getting his pay for his latest rounds.

When he finally got back to the main level of the bar, the assassin noted the presence of a few Decepticons in the back of the bar. As this wasn't entirely unusual, they came in once or twice a megacycle and drank high-grade until they couldn't walk anymore and generally harassed the civilian bots while leaving the gladiators alone, he decided only to keep an optic on them as he finished up his business here.

Giving the few Decepticons a last once over on his way to the fight fixer, Orpheus decide to ignore them, get his credits, and split. He really didn't feel like wasting time this cycle trying to see what kind of high-grade could compare to the energon on the _ATHENS_.

Unfortunately for his plans, one of the Decepticons decided that meeting one of the gladiators would be something interesting to do.

A _'Yo, mech!_ ' from across the room stalled him briefly, and one of the Decepticons stumbled over and tried to sling an arm across his shoulder plates, only to punch one of the other bots in the packed barroom before adjusting his arm's trajectory to set down where he intended it to go. "Yur's not ta bad at this-is fight'en ting."

Orpheus offlined his optics for a moment when the mech finally made contact, counting to ten silently in his processor and trying not to slug the Decepticon for the simple transgression of talking to him when he wasn't in the mood to deal with others.

He ran the reactions of the other Covert Ops bots through his CPU, trying to find a better method of dealing with his latest annoyance. Shadowdancer would have either quietly offlined or quickly deactivated him before he even got within reach of her, depending on how many witnesses were around, so she was out. Rook would've flirted awhile then stolen everything of value off him when he finally passed out from the high-grade, not exactly the image he was going for so she was out as well. Drax would snarl something rude and break the mech's arm, if he didn't just simply rip the arm completely off in the first place, which was intriguing enough to remain an option. Trickflip would smirk and socialize for bit, looking for gossip he could use, and Orpheus was more than a little low on the Intel side of his job.

Forcing back a sigh, the assassin gave his new limpet a flat look. "What do you want?"

Being sociable was far out of his comfort zone, and if they didn't like it there was always Drax's option to fall back on.

"Ya ever tink abouts joinin da Cons?"

The mech was well and truly overcharged, if he didn't have a good grip on the SPARTAN mech he would have already lost the fight with his own stabilizers and crashed to the ground.

"Cause, we've ben look'en for soom, uh…" Blinking the mech peered at the bot supporting him as he lost his train of thought. "…what're we talken bout?"

"That you wanted to sign up for a round or two in the arena yourself." Orpheus was looking around for somewhere to dump his overcharged burden when the mech suddenly lurched off of him. Jerking around, the assassin raised an optic ridge as the mech made his unsteady way over to the fight fixer, loudly proclaiming that he was going to beat the current pit champion. At least, that's what he thought the slurred and garbled mess that came out of the mech's vocalizer said.

Hesitating, torn between wanting to watch as the overcharged Decepticon got himself deactivated and collecting his gladiator's fee and finding someplace not rust encrusted and relatively clean for the off-cycle, the SPARTAN ran what the mech had almost said through his processor.

If the Decepticons were recruiting, he could get a somewhat steady job and stop dropping in the arenas three or four times a megacycle. A few of the owners were starting to refuse him, citing that he had killed off more bots than the common affliction of rust did every stellar cycle and that paying him was like slitting their own fuel lines.

Orpheus gave the loose grouping of Decepticons in the back a once over. The buddies of the Decepticon he had directed into the arena were sloppily cursing out their fellow in the arena as the current pit champion used him like a rag, tossing the overcharged Con around the ring simply for kicks.

Snorting, the SPARTAN mech wondered what Shadowdancer would say if he suggested enlisting as a Decepticon for a while.

\V/

Jerking upright, Drax frowned thoughtfully as Spotter hacked into his terminal with a communication from Vos.

"She still hasn't left you alone yet?" He let his pedes hit the floor, having been so rudely interrupted in his rather bored musing of what he and his trine could do that cycle to kill time.

"Nope. Getting awfully insistent about this slag, too." Markmaker had time to grin at the SPARTANs' trine leader before a very impatient seeker femme shoved him aside.

No easy feat considering that even if the SPARTANs were lighter than normal bots in their frame class, the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots was still a _tank_.

"You," the femme, who Drax figured was the Dawnglider that the Enforcer SPARTAN had told him about, "you are to report to the Aero Space Division. I don't care if you've never reported there before, _all_ seekers report to the fragging Aero Space Headquarters!"

The seeker framed Covert Ops assault specialist glowered at the femme in his terminal monitor. "Why should I? I have my chain of command, and they don't know slag about you."

"You should," shouted Markmaker from the background of the comm transmission, "because if you don't, I'll tell Shadow' what you've been doing to this poor, overworked femme, and you know exactly what she'll do to you!"

Drax blinked as Dawnglider gave the mech that let her use his external comm device a thoughtful look. "Would that hurry this up? Who is Shadow', anyways?"

"Don't you fragging dare, Mark'." The trine leader's optic ridges drew together in a scowl. "Fine, we'll be there in a few cycles."

Dawnglider had the ball bearings to smirk at him. "Fantastic, I'll let the council know."

She even wiggled her clawed finger tips at him as a farewell before cutting the comm link.

Revving his turbines irritably, the seeker turned from his terminal only to catch sight of his trine mates peering into the bridge.

Tigerstripe looked to his slighter counterpart, ignoring the very annoyed expression that crossed the dark seeker's faceplate. "Does this mean we're moving the _ATHENS_ again, or are we just going to crash with Mark'?"

"I vote we move the _ATHENS_. Besides, Mark' is living in an Enforcer's barracks, and I really don't want to know what goes on there." Spotter frowned thoughtfully as he plotted out what needed to be done before that could happen. "Have you two notice anything… _odd_ lately?"

"Define odd." Drax gave up glaring at his trine mates when they proceeded to ignore any sign that he would rather be alone. "In fact, place 'odd' for me."

The communications specialist hunched his shoulder joints, nearly smacking Tigerstripe's back when his wing plates drew upwards with the motion, and locked his optics on the deck. "Just something a bit… off about the ship."

"Well… now that you mentioned it," the largest seeker in the trine rubbed the underside of his jaw hinge thoughtfully, "that rift in the outside plating, I could swear it's getting smaller. Clipped my left wing on the side the last time we went out that way."

The other two seekers frowned at the wing plates of the third, looking it over for damage.

Tigerstripe held up his hands before Drax actually got up to take a closer look. "Just scraped some paint off, I swear."

"More like you're getting sloppy, double check you clearance next time." The trine leader looked around at the ship the trine had inhabited for the last half of a vorn. "We just need some new settings; you're starting to get this ship confused with the ones we've been on in the past."

Drax hoisted himself out of the bridge's command chair and over to his trine mates.

"Let's leave the _ATHENS_ here, and just take a leisurely flight path to Vos and see what this so called seeker council wants with us. Err… after the decacycle report this off-cycle. Wait a tick, Spot'," the dark painted seeker looked over to the recon scout, "aren't you working on something for Nitro?"

The silver seeker shrugged and started to walk out of the bridge. "I finished that last megacycle, Drax."

(ooo000ooo)

The seeker femme in Vos frowned at the external comm device the Enforcer next to her had been gracious enough to let her use. "Is this going to work?"

"It should. Drax is a stubborn aft, but he said he'll do it and that he and the trine will be here in a few cycles, and he is, if nothing else, always straight forward despite his… usual occupation." Markmaker took back his external comm unit and patted the femme on the back, being extra careful in avoiding the wing joints on her back. "If this doesn't work, there is always the option of calling Shadowdancer."

"That's the second time you've mentioned her. Who is she?" Dawnglider almost wanted to pout.

First she gets the oh-so-lucky job of trying to corral a trine of stubborn seeker mechs to report in, then she gets the run around from said trine until she broke down and begged the same Enforcer mech that helped her get in contact with the oddly incommunicado trine in the first place for more help, now there seemed to be a type of short cut that she only learned about after the fact.

"Shadow's… uh…" Markmaker rubbed the back of his helm and winced at the rather acidic glare the seeker femme gave him. "Look, I know you're starting to really hate hearing this, but I really can't tell you much."

The tank shrugged when the seeker revved her turbines in irritation.

"She's our cohort sister, just this side of mechacidal in temperament, and some bot neither of us wants torqued with us."

"Mechacidal? Why hasn't she gotten that fixed?" Dawnglider rubbed under her optics as the bartender for the bar the two were sitting in came over and handed her the cube of energon she requested before asking the tank for help again.

The gunmetal and black mech nodded his thanks to the same bot as he picked up his own cube. "I haven't the slightest idea why she kept that glitch. Might have something to do with where she's now living, but… well, Shadow' just wouldn't be Shadowdancer without the ever looming threat of mechacidal intentions behind her."

\V/

Two Decepticons, on a routine patrol of the nearly destroyed streets of Kaon, had stopped to take a break near the old guild building of the Stonewall Defenders.

If any of the old guild bots could have seen their old building, none of them would have been able to recognize the dilapidated structure as having once been their former base of operations. After Optimus and the Autobots had pulled out of the city, the Decepticons and their supporters had amassed a large force to try and capture the last Prime and the other high ranking officers of the Autobots, and in their fury over the last Prime's escape they had nearly torn the building down to the basement levels.

Besides the piles of rubble tossed haphazardly around, the only things left standing from the old building was the metal support beams sticking up out of the ground.

The slighter of the two, more alert than his hapless partner for the off-cycle, caught the sound of falling stone and turned around fast enough to get an optic full of dust when the rubble from the building shifted and one side of the discarded pile of rocks tumbled loose and slid to the ground. "Slaggit! What the frag are we sitting around here for?"

"Cause we were fragging ordered to, why else?" The larger of the two idly picked up a rock and threw it at the other, sneering when the slighter mech dodged it. "If you wanna go back, ya little coward, I ain't stopping you."

"A coward am I?" Kicking at the other's pedes, the slimmer 'Con taunted his patrol partner. "May I remind you why we're out here instead of holed up in a bar somewhere up to our optics in high-grade?"

"Remind me of that, an I'll kick you in your aft so hard your motherboard will feel it." The larger Con got back to his pedes and took a step closer to the other.

"Sure you will." Looking around, the slighter mech beckoned his partner on. "Common, then. We ain't going to finish this slag by sitting around here. Sides, this place gives me the glitches."

A snort answered him, but the larger of the two started to follow anyways. "You're not subscribing to that rumor, are you? Slag, an here I thought you were made of a stiffer alloy."

"You explain the weird slag that's been happening then."

Trickflip peered over the rim of the roof he had taken refuge on when the two Decepticons had wandered into this section of the city, mildly interested to hear if the so called rumor was about him.

He had taken to making the City's Decepticons function an absolute living Pit out of boredom, and hearing that his work was appreciated was always nice. His lip plates twisted as he noted that the two were getting too far away for his audio receptors to catch what they were talking about, but that also meant they had no way to hear him and his impromptu guests.

The civilians of Kaon were split down the middle about their occupation with Decepticon forces, making the infiltrator's work that much harder. No bot wanted to be spotted with a mech that evaded every attempt by the Cons in regulating where and when the civilian bots could walk about their own city.

To make matters even worse, Autobot sympathizers were being hunted down and deactivated by the Decepticon troops for _sport_. Trickflip had his metal hands full with ensuring that he heard about any arrest before a large group of Cons got bored and deactivated them; with keeping himself and those that he sprang from the slipshod holding cells out of sight until he could arrange for the Autobot sympathizing bots to secure a safe way out of the city; and with distracting the Decepticon officers in the city from cracking down and making his self-appointed task even harder.

The SPARTAN mech smiled down at the very curious femme youngling that was currently taking up space in his lap, and nodded to the youngling's creators a few feet farther back. "They're gone now."

Oddly enough, Trickflip had two femmes and the youngling with him on the roof.

"Thank Primus." The red femme huffed out in obvious relief. The SPARTAN was relatively certain that she was the carrier, but was still too confused about how this family unit operated to risk insulting her in case he was wrong. "Bells, you can get off the nice mech now."

"Nuh-uh!" The silver and black youngling femme exclaimed as she snuggled farther into the infiltrator's lower chassis, stubbornly gripping his side plating and pouting at her creators.

Silverbell was quite happy where she was. The mech was nice and warm, even warmer than her thermal blanket back home.

Trickflip blinked bemusedly at her stubborn declaration. This was something he had never thought would happen to him.

"But if you don't get off me, Hell's Bells," he raised his hands and tickled the little youngling's sides, making her squeal loudly and fall off her perch in his lap. "I can't go and get us some fuel."

He handed the still giggling youngling over to the femme he was nearly positive was her creator and pulled himself up to a crouch to check to see if the coast was clear yet.

The hot pink and silver femme, who had introduced herself as Flashfire when she all but begged the SPARTAN to rescue her bonded, gave him a grateful smile as she deftly handled her youngling, filing the odd sounding word away to look up later. "I really can't thank you enough for doing all of this."

She really had thought that the mech would just rescue Ruby from being deactivated and then leave them to find a way out of the city by themselves. She had never been happier in being wrong when the mech steered them on from where he had her and Silverbell hide while he broke into the Decepticon holding cells and helped them avoid every Con patrol they had encountered so far.

The femme youngling whimpered in fright when the acid green and black mech gave her and her creators a reassuring smile before simply dropping over the edge of the roof. She squirmed out of her creator's hands and scrambled over to the edge, peering cautiously over like the mech had told her and her creators to do to keep from being spotted. "Can't see him."

"You won't be able to, Bells." Ruby cautiously crept over and scooped the youngling up. "I wasn't even able to see him until he wanted me to."

The red femme rubbed Silverbell's back plates as she whimpered.

"Hey, now remember that he's very good at what he does. He got me out of the cells, while I was right under the olfactory sensors of those nasty bots."

Flashfire smiled softly as Silverbell pouted some more and she looked over to her bonded. "Do you know what 'Hell's' means?"

\V/

Nitro whistled tunelessly as he opened the door to his impromptu holding cell. Axel looked up at him from where he was inspecting the chains and locks that bound him and grimaced at the noise. "You can't carry a tune to save your function, mech."

The Praxian shrugged as he set down a cube of energon for the bounty hunter. "I know."

Frowning at the cube, one of the sealed types that allowed bots to inspect it for tampering before consumption, Axel gave his warden a long look. "And this is for?"

"Good behavior." Smirking at the groan from the other mech, Nitro took his customary seat on the empty packing create and waved a hand at him. "Don't fall over yourself now, there is a good reason I'm keeping you functioning."

The bounty hunter thumped his helm on the wall behind him. "You know, if I didn't like your humor so much, I'd be tempted to hit you for that."

Sarcastic words aside, he reached for the cube and turned it around to see if there had been anything done to the energon inside.

"So… what _do_ you want?"

"Well, I might just want to torture you with my whistling for another joor or two."

"Spare me, please." Deciding that there was nothing wrong with the cube, Axel cracked open the seal and peered inside at the softly glowing fuel. "What is this?"

"Mid-grade."

The tan and gray Praxian grinned at the surprised expression that crossed the other mech's faceplate.

"It is, in fact, _ATHENS_ ' mid-grade, and we're a little proud of it. One of my brothers sends each of us four or five cubes every megacycle, and I just got in another create of them. That one," Nitro pointed to the cube in the bounty hunter's hands, "is one of my surplus cubes."

"You're giving me _mid-grade?_ "

"Well, I can't exactly go out and buy a cube for you, some Enforcer femme has been hanging around trying to find out if I've seen you since I busted up my store front in tripping you up." Blinking a bit, the demolitions specialist processed what he said. "Well, actually I could, but that Enforcer would wonder why I take a cube downstairs with me when I usually refuel in the shop."

Axel looked over sharply. "What the frag does that mean?"

"I only need about a third of the energy that you do to keep functioning at the same level." Still smirking, Nitro fluttered his door-wings teasingly at his prisoner. "I can go several cycles without refueling or recharging if needed. One medic told us two or three orns, but Rook has found that it's actually closer to four."

"Rook… the saboteur in Praxus?" Ignoring the taunt, the bounty hunter looked over curiously. "Since I don't think your ever letting me go, you care to explain this twisted family unit of yours? It sounds like your all from a military unit, but you keep referring to the others as your cohort siblings."

"I could… if you don't mind getting cozy down here until one of the officers can break away to… _interview_ you." Nitro tapped the tips of his fingers against his thigh plating. "Which I think would be either Holdout… or Shadowdancer, if she ever gets a free megacycle."

"Which one wanted to see me herself, with all sinister intentions included?"

"Shadow'."

Axel finally took a sip of the cube as he thought it over. "Can it be this Holdout bot?"

Snorting, the Praxian gave his guest a long look. "If you insist, but Shadow really isn't as bad as you're thinking."

"I highly doubt that."

"Alright. I mean, I can see where you're coming from, she did punch Ultra Magnus in the face plate, but the mech had it coming!" Nitro blinked as the bounty hunter spluttered into the cube. "Are you alright?"

"She-she punched _who_?"

"Ultra Magnus," when that failed to stop the gaping expression, dripping energon and all, from being directed to him, the demolitions specialist continued slowly, as if talking to a very slow processing bot, "the military Commander of the Autobots. He also leads the Elite Guard in Iacon."

Axel had the irrational urge to throw his cube at the Praxian. "I know who he is, smart aft, but that just makes it worse. If that femme has the titanium clad bolts to punch _him_ , I don't want to see even _her_ shadow."

"Shadowdancer was my training squad leader; I'm telling you that she's not that bad to be around." Nitro frowned as the bounty hunter started to laugh at him. "Why does every bot think talking to her is the closest thing to visiting the Pit?"

"Cause you're exempt from seeing her like the rest of us do. She knows you, you know her, and you can tolerate each other. Us lesser bots have to struggle just getting to know you," Axel snickered at the still confused look on the Praxian's face plate, "I'd hate to think what some bot has to go through to get to know her."

The SPARTAN was still frowning, he was of the personal opinion that you had to meet a bot before judging them, but decided to change the subject before he irreparably damaged the XO's so called reputation. "So, you want to see Hold' then?"

"And Hold' is? Mind you, I'll take him over Shadowdancer any orn."

"Her, Holdout is our tracking specialist and supply officer."

Axel shrugged. "Her it is then." He paused after taking another sip of the mid-grade. "So, story time?"

\V/

Warcry was trying to see if he could throw his stylus hard enough to lodge it into the ceiling when Sideswipe and Sunstreaker bolted into his office at a dead run.

The tank paused after snatching the falling stylus out of the air, watching the two front-line twins scramble around for a hiding place. After a bare breem, Sunstreaker had wedged himself in the corner against a few filing cabinets and Sideswipe all but dove across his desk to hide underneath both the desk and his pedes, Prowl all but stalked inside the tank's office. "Warcry, I apologize for the interruption, but may I have a moment?"

The SPARTAN CO took one long look at the very stern setting on the faceplates of the Praxian and extended a hand in the direction of the chairs intended for guests. "What can I do for you, Prowl?"

With a wary optic on the nearly jerky moments, the tank wondered what it was that happened to have the tactician all but grinding his dental plates in frustration.

"It has come to my attention that your unit is badly understaffed." Prowl reached into his subspace and pulled out a datapad that he handed over to the SPARTAN. "A regular unit consists of thirty or more bots, while your unit barely amounts to eighteen."

As Warcry looked the pad over, it contained roster lists of other units compared to his own, the black and white ex-Enforcer continued.

"It was one of my duties this cycle to see if you were amenable to accepting additional personnel, but I have an additional request."

The tank Commander blinked at the Praxian, who cast a pointed look over to the corner where the top of Sunstreaker's helm could be seen.

"Uh… Prowl, as much as I believe you're actually concerned by this issue, you do need to keep in your processor that we're not really… um… a normal unit." Warcry waved a hand, the best he could do with two mechs that didn't know the truth about the unit's past in the room. "Are you sure you want us to do this?"

The very wicked looking smirk that crossed the tactician's face plate made the SPARTAN blink. "I am positive."

"You know, you're starting to look and sound like another Praxian I know."

Leaning back even further, the metallic green and black tank sighed.

"If you want us to, I suppose we can take on a few others and see if they fit in somewhere. However," Warcry frowned at the glint of sliver he could see under his desk, "final decisions have to be ours. I won't try to saddle my soldiers with bots they don't trust, and can't work with, considering who we are and what we do."

"That is fair." Prowl's smirk smoothed out and he gave the tank a respectful nod as he got up. "I will await your first selections for trainees. There is a supplemental list that contains every bot that is not assigned to a unit on that data pad."

Warcry grumbled under his intakes, but returned the Praxian's nod as the mech walked out of his office. "You two can come out now. Sunstreaker, you suck total slag at hiding yourself."

The gold mech just sneered at him as he pried himself out of the corner. Sideswipe stretched out on the floor and smirked up at the SPARTAN. "So, what's this I hear about possible inductions?"

"I highly doubt you really want to be a part of my unit."

"Says who?" The silver swordmech wiggled far enough out from under the desk to sit up and peer over the tank's treaded arm at the datapad he held. "How hard can it be? You're all what, a civilian defense unit? It's not like it's all that fragging difficult."

Warcry arched an optic ridge at the split-spark twins.

"You keep telling yourselves that." When all the two metallic mechs did was move around the room and take a seat in front of his desk much like Prowl had not even a breem before, the SPARTAN Commander sighed. "We're not a civilian defense unit. That's just what we're doing at the moment."

"Obviously," Sunstreaker snorted at him as he inspected his paint for scratches, "what civilian defense unit has a _tank_ for a _Commanding officer?_ "

"Actually, we have two." The tank thought about that for a moment, then amended that statement. "Well, really three, but Tigerstripe is a seeker and I don't think he counts as the type of tank your thinking of."

"Even better. I take it we won't be the only decent fighters in the unit then?" Sideswipe started a bit as Warcry barked out a laugh.

"Decent? Ha!"

The tank grinned at the now wary looking twins.

"Each one of my soldiers is 'decent' enough that you two would look completely inept next to them. Let's see," he counted off who was where on two hands, "three are maintaining surveillance in Decepticon held cities, three are in Autobot held cities, and the rest that are not here, are in Neutral cities. So far we have had our bodyguard almost deactivated when he interfered with the old Prime being deactivated by traitors; three that have dipped into the gladiator job class for a while and our assassin who still is a gladiator; an ex-thief turned saboteur who happens to be hunting Decepticons in her assigned city; a demolitions specialist handling a bounty hunter; our tactician is running a _Decepticon friendly bar_ ; two acting Enforcers; a tracker that's helping another of the unit become a medic; a trine of seekers that really aren't doing anything at the moment; a scattering of a handful in other jobs; and there's still two and a half vorns before we recollect ourselves here."

Warcry grinned at his hands before looking up to smirk at the shocked looks on the two front-liners' faceplates.

"Stated out loud it sort of sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? You sure you want to join my unit?"

Sideswipe traded a look with his brother.

"Yes." The silver twin leaned forward and smirked at the tank himself. "If you're trying to scare us off, it's not going to work."

\V/

Stroking a clawed hand down Kynaite's back plates, the SPARTAN-Bot's XO smirked at the rather cute sounding series of clicks the tired out sparkling collapsed across her chassis gave her.

Stretched out on her back, door-wings flush against her berth in a manner that she knew would ache during the next cycle but was more comfortable for the sparkling; Shadowdancer reduced her optics to half power and concentrated on her tactical uplink with Spotter for the decacycle reports. { _Zero-seven-zero? Are you ready?_ }

{ _Who are you, and what did you do to three-four-one? Normally you would just start up without warning me._ } Spotter, sitting at the _ATHENS_ ' communication station in the bridge, booted up the array and started with the slight tingle that warned the SPARTANs to find someplace quiet. { _How's the Scraplet?_ }

{ _Tired. He's had a nasty encounter with a virus, and he has made it clear to me that he really doesn't like being sick. I had to get Zephyr to take him in to the medics, and she's starting to ask why I can't go._ } Shadowdancer broke off as the other SPARTANs started to sound in, starting with their roster number and location, and ending with all if any issues they wanted the others' opinions on.

{ _Zero-four-six in Iacon, we have a request to take on additional soldiers._ }

{ _One-one-three,_ ATHENS _, we're being called to Vos._ }

{ _Zero-two-seven in Simfur, about that bounty hunter._ }

{ _One-four-four, Polyhex. I have a question._ }

{ _One-nine-six in Kaon, I have a bit of an issue._ }

Tuning out the others as they just reported themselves and no pending complications, the XO mused on what was happening.

There seemed to be more and more difficulties popping up the longer the SPARTANs stuck it out in the civilian sector. { _Zero-four-six, I do believe you're first. Who made the request?_ }

( _That would be Prowl. I think it was on behalf of Prime. There's a bit of concern that since we have a lot less bots in the unit, that we are risking stretching ourselves a bit too thin. Prowl also asked to take on training for bots that are a bit less than, lets' just say upstanding._ } Warcry took another look at the list that the Praxian Autobot left with him, before uploading that so the tactician could look it over.

Across from him, Silentforce tilted his helm in confusion at Galeforce, who only shrugged before looking around at the other Autobots in the rec room with the three Autobot SPARTANs.

{ _That's not really a bad idea, considering that we_ are _stretched too thin._ } Rook tapped her finger tips on the floor of her dojo, having abandoned the act of cleaning the floor in favor of listening in on Bluestreak teaching Smokescreen what she had taught him. { _They will never be able to truly replace any of us, but even a little bit of assistance helps._ }

{ _I have to agree with one-two-seven._ } Shadowdancer snickered quietly to herself at the varied exclamations that rang through the uplink. { _Think about it, what happens if another city turns Decepticon? Who would we have on hand to help with resettlement? Having additional personnel available will keep us from trying to overreach ourselves, and when we actually can't hide the war built purpose that we have, the recruits can deal with the less than accepting bots of the civilian population. Any bot against the idea of more soldiers in the unit?_ }

She waited a breem before continuing.

{ _Since none of you object, I'll look this list over and get it back to you in a few cycles, zero-four-six._ }

{ _There are two that want in already, three-four-one. Two front-liner twins, a bit rough and tumble but they are not actually all that bad on the battle field._ } Silentforce looked at the tank in askance, who just shrugged in reply.

{ _If you want them, fine but they have to conform to our rules and regulations. One-one-three, why are you going to Vos?_ }

The dark painted trine leader scowled at his smirking trine mates. { _It's something about that seeker trine that betrayed Sentinel. Four-five-nine knows more about it than I do._ }

{ _No I don't. The seekers don't trust me at all, and haven't really told me much of anything about why they want you._ } Markmaker smiled a bit painfully at the arguing seeker couple in front of him. The screeching was starting to get on his last neuro cluster. { _I know it has to do with the Air Commander title and who is supposed to get it._ }

{ _I take it seekers don't trust non seekers?_ } Half his processors on the road and half on the current discussion, Quickgrip made a sharp turn on the mountain road he was on.

{ _Pretty much, they were getting desperate when they started asking me._ } Markmaker calmly separated the seekers before the femme could scratch the optics out of the other. Holding them at his arm's length, he shuddered and offlined his audio receptors as the screeching got louder. { _I think it has something to do with the Decepticons, three-four-one. At least, that's what the femme seeker that talked to me said._ }

Shadowdancer stroked her clawed hand down Kynaite's back again when he whimpered at her. { _Fine. One-one-three, are you and your trine going to leave the_ ATHENS _where it is or move it?_ }

{ _Leave it._ }

Warcry waved Silentforce off when the mech indicated that he had to leave for the new bots to Iacon's base orientation class. { _If that's all, let's move on. Zero-two-seven, what about your bounty hunter?_ }

{ _Axel agreed to meet four-five-eight in return for learning more about us. Given the information you gave me, ma'am, it looks like he will be amicable to working for us. However, there is the slight issue that this Shockwave mech popped up again; he's who hired Axel and his partner in the first place. The bounty hunters only talked to the mech through the public terminal message system, there's no indication of where he is at the moment._ }

{ _AI has a megacycle long workshop set up in a few cycles at one of the medical stations; I can get leave and swing by then._ } Holdout smirked over to the now pouting Refit, who had wanted to tell the others herself.

{ _Terrific, let me know how that goes._ } Shadowdancer rapped her claw tips on her berth as she reviewed what else needed to be dealt with.{ _One-four-four, your question is?_ }

{ _Can I enlist as a Decepticon?_ } Orpheus smirked wickedly as silence rang through the uplink.

Warcry's optic ridges rose. { _Can I ask why?_ }

{ _I don't think there is any rule against doing double agent work, zero-four-six._ } Shadowdancer herself had frozen still when the assassin spoke up, but her processors were already turning the suggestion over to see if there was any merit to it. { _However, that does bring to my CPU some concerns, one-four-four._ }

{ _Just for Intel, ma'am. I can't really learn anything from where I'm at, and the arena owners are really starting to resent the sight of me._ }

The XO blew out a draft of warm air from her vents. { _Fine, but I want to see you in person sometime soon. Next._ }

{ _That would be me, ma'am. I have a family unit of three femmes that doesn't have a safe place to go._ } Trickflip idly ambled around the temporary camp that he had set up well outside of Kaon's walls for Flashfire, Ruby, and Silverbell when the femmes had reluctantly admitted that they had no idea what to do now.

{ _Wait, what?_ } Rook blinked and jerked upright when the infiltrator admitted his problem. { _Why do you have a family unit with you?_ }

{ _The Decepticons are now deactivating all of the Autobot sympathizers they can find in Kaon. I've been rescuing them as I can, but this last group has nowhere to go._ }

Warcry frowned down at the data pad Galeforce had been recording the meeting on. { _When did this start?_ }

{ _Shortly after Prime left with the rest of you._ } The acid green and black mech wiggled his finger joints at Silverbell as the youngling femme blinked at him blearily from over a red shoulder joint. { _I was going to direct them to you, sir, but they are kinda stubborn and don't want to rely on the Autobots to support them._ }

{ _One-nine-six, you're pulling out of Kaon for a while, right?_ } Shadowdancer frowned thoughtfully as she stared up at the ceiling. { _Send the family to either one-two-seven or four-five-eight, and go wait a few stellar cycles with them for slag to settle in the city._ }

{ _One-two-seven?_ } Holdout grimaced at the thought of four more bots in her tiny home that she would have to hide from Sandstorm. { _Can you take them?_ }

Rook thought through everything that she would need for four additional bots. { _Possibly, but you're still the fall back point in case of emergency._ }

{ _Like that would ever change._ } The tracker femme cast a quick look at the medic next to her. { _With the base here, I'm probably the safest place besides Iacon._ }

{ _Alright, if that takes care of the issues, let's move on to the actual reports._ } Warcry rubbed the bottom of his jaw plate as the groans across the uplink died down. { _Starting with you, three-four-one. Did you say Scraplet was having difficulties with a virus?_ }


	13. Chapter 13

Optimus' optics narrowed as he frowned at the data pad he held, one hand tightening on the edge of his desk and imprinting his finger joints into the metal.

Still ever present at the Prime's back, Ironhide raised an optic ridge at the uncharacteristic behavior out of his charge. "What is it, Prime?"

"Have you… heard anything out of Kaon yet, Ironhide?" Vocalizer measured and even, nothing betrayed the sick feeling rising up in the Autobots' Prime's tanks.

"Naw, ah think it's ah bit too early ta hear anythin out 'o dere, why?"

"Warcry left Trickflip, his Covert Ops infiltrator, in Kaon when we left the city, and this decacycle report from the SPARTANs has what he learned about the current events after we left." When the black mech moved from his position against the wall, near the door just in case of attack, and walked over to read over Optimus' shoulder plates, the red and blue Prime just handed the pad over to the mech that had watched his back ever since he became a Prime. "The Decepticons are deactivating Autobot sympathizers, even if those sympathizers are not causing them trouble."

Ironhide snorted derisively, his engine running a bit too hot in his anger. "Deir _'Cons_ , Prime. Were ya expectin 'em ta leave bots tha' could make der functions miserable alone?"

The bodyguard paged passed that part of the SPARTANs' report and started to read the decacycle summaries that every bot in the SPARTAN unit submitted on Optimus' request. He grunted and passed the pad back.

"Least Trick's been savin 'em as he can. Look, he's got ah pair 'o femmes an der bitlit out just ah' fore he made tha' report."

The Prime took it and read over the same part his bodyguard just had. His frame relaxed minutely as Trickflip's report of the femme youngling that didn't want to give him up as a personal space heater made its place in his processor. "We should have stayed there longer."

"Second guessing yourself now?" Warcry grinned at the two from the open door. "That's supremely inane and pointless, Optimus. Are you trying to be the next mech that Shadow' punches in the faceplate for stupidity while on duty?"

"Warcry, how long have you been there?" The Prime waved a hand so the SPARTAN CO would enter his office anyway.

The tank shrugged as he smirked at Ironhide's resentful look. "Not long, I have two bots that Shadowdancer actually agreed to attempt to add to the unit and was coming by to see if you approve of us stealing them out from under you."

"Ya owe meh ah rematch, mech." The bodyguard's engine growled as the SPARTAN laughed at him, retracing his steps back to his customary position.

"Sure, how about two cycles from now?" Warcry sauntered into the Prime's office and slumped into one of the two chairs before the mech's desk as Ironhide nodded his agreement. "We couldn't have done anything if we had stayed, Prime. Trick' also reported that the Stonewall Defenders' guild headquarters was attacked by a large group of Decepticons only joors after we left. They were there with the intent to deactivate you as well as the other Autobot officers. Sticking around would have only earned us more damaged personnel, the odd possible deactivation, and the risk of losing the only Prime we have left."

Kicking up one pede on the desk, the tank tilted his helm to the side as the Prime's faceplate acquired a stubborn set to it.

"That is no excuse. There were still bots that needed us there, and we abandoned them to the Decepticons."

"Prime-" Ironhide began, only to be cut off by the SPARTAN CO.

"If you really want me too, I'll call Shadowdancer up here so she can explain to you exactly what your options would have been if we stayed." Warcry smirked at the briefly panicked look that replaced the stubborn one. "But you already know how that's going to turn out given what she did to Ultra Magnus when he had _his_ personal crisis, and you can probably imagine what she'll do to you. Trick' was probably the only one there at the time besides Jazz, Shadowdancer herself, and _maybe_ Prowl, who could have made a difference. He did make a difference by saving those he could even at great personal risk to himself. He even has to leave Kaon for a few stellar cycles because he was so successful at it, cutting it out of the cities we can get information from. Prowl and Jazz couldn't stay, because you needed them here. Shadow' couldn't because she has Kynaite to think about now, and a war torn city isn't the kind of place she wants to have that sparkling remember when he upgrades to his next frame. We remember enough of them ourselves to not wish that on any other bot."

Nudging the data pad on the desk, the one that Galeforce recorded the decacycle reports on last cycle, the SPARTAN tank gave the other Commander a bitter grin as he held the blue optics with his own gold ones.

"With bots where we sit are concerned, sending those that have the skills needed in certain places is the only thing we can do about situations like this."

Optimus released a heavy sigh at the tank's reasoning, gripping the sides of his desk. "And what about when those that have the skills are deactivated because of what we have ordered them to do?"

"Pray they find peace in the Matrix… then find a replacement for them fast." Warcry's bitter grin turned into a very grim smile with a shadow of haunted experience behind it. "Cause that means something went horribly wrong, and that also generally fragging means slag is about to hit you where it _hurts_."

Silence reigned in the office for a few breems, each mech lost in his own thoughts, before the SPARTAN CO shook his helm and continued in a markedly brighter and forced tone.

"Now then, Shadow' and the others agreed to take on additional soldiers, but I want to go slow and see if any can stand up to the hard use SPARTANs go through on the type of missions that we tend to get. Prowl has also requested that we also train the less than cooperative soldiers, and I see no reason not to."

Ironhide snorted in wry amusement, trying to get rid of the echo of pain that had been in the tank's vocalizer still ringing in his audio receptors. "Ah wish ya luck."

"We are not the ones you should be wishing luck to." Warcry's grin turned positively evil.

\V/

Rook ended classes early one orn then locked the doors behind the students she all but threw out of the dojo, and that was unusual enough to have several of them wander to the merchant's district and inquire what was going on with her from Bluestreak. Since the gray merchant Praxian didn't have a clue, they wandered away from the merchant's stall gossiping about what could be important enough to have their teacher close shop early.

Not entirely sure if he should go for his own off-cycle class, Bluestreak eventually ended up in his brother's Enforcer Station to see if the femme had given Smokescreen any reason why. Siren, on desk duty, gave the Praxian a wave from where he was trying to devise the reasoning behind some bot's attempted theft from the argument going on before him.

The diversionary tactician looked up briefly when Bluestreak wandered into sight. "Blue, is there something wrong?"

"Rook closed the dojo, and she didn't tell me she was going to, so I don't know if I should go or not. Which is kinda strange, if you think about it, she's never done this before. I mean, if she's going to be late one cycle, she lets the bots that have scheduled classes know well ahead of time. But she-"

"You are rambling again, Bluestreak." Steeljaw nudged the gray Praxian's leg plating in greeting as he wandered over to see what brought the younger mech to the Station. "Why not just go and see if she lets you in?"

"Well, there's the problem. Rook _locked the doors_ , and that was unusual enough to have some of the other bots that have classes at this time ask me what was wrong, because she does like spending time with us when she isn't teaching and they thought that maybe I would know what was important enough for her to close down for the cycle." The younger Praxian clamped his mouth components shut, trying hard to keep himself from going on about how the gray femme had usually acted.

He didn't talk that much, but when he was worried or stressed he could go on long enough to even make Rook look at him strangely, which didn't really happen that often.

Smokescreen checked the timetable for Enforcer patrols posted on the wall. "I suppose you can come with Blaster and me when we go out in a few breems, but I really don't know what to tell you if Rook doesn't answer her door, Blue. She does have a right to her privacy."

"Ooh, look Bluestreak!" Blaster, having heard his name pop up, slung an arm across the younger Praxian's shoulders and grinned at the older brother. "He can process differently if you yell at him enough! Took you long enough to admit that Rook wasn't doing anything wrong."

"I never said that, just that she has a right to be left alone for a cycle or two." The diversionary tactician ran his processor over the little over half of a vorn that Rook had been in Praxus. "She hasn't taken an orn off since she got here."

"So, we're swinging by her place then?" The communications expert released the younger Praxian and beckoned to his cassettes. "Wonder if she wouldn't mind taking a walk with the rest of us."

(ooo000ooo)

Whatever the Praxian brothers, Blaster, and his cassettes were expecting; the sight of a rather hefty acid green and black mech with a slighter red femme, an even smaller but elegant hot pink and silver femme, and a positively tiny black and silver femme youngling wasn't _quite_ it.

Rook was quietly talking something over with the two adult framed femmes while the mech was carefully listening to the youngling chatter on about what she saw. Orange optics, the same shade of color Rook had, snapped up to pin the Enforcers with a curious look when they came into view.

"Hello, what do we have here?" The mech straightened up as much as he could with a youngling clinging to his hand and trying to hide behind him at the same time.

The gray SPARTAN femme looked up when she heard Trickflip speak up, her own optics following the direction her 'brother's' were focused in.

"Oh, they're fine, Trick'. They're just a few friends of mine." Rook waved the mechs over, giving a fond smile to Bluestreak as he walked up first. "I think I'm going to have to cancel the rest of this cycle's classes, Blue. This is taking a bit longer than I thought."

"That's fine, I was just on my way over to ask if you needed me to inform the others." The merchant fluttered his door-wings at the youngling, smiling himself when she giggled at him and shyly hid behind an acid green shin plate.

Smokescreen looked the four unknown bots over as Blaster's cassettes tried to coax the youngling out from behind the mech. All of them except the youngling showed signs of hard travel, and the mech had a few scores along his armor that looked to be from blaster fire.

Oddly enough, it looked like the scores only affected the paint and not the mech's armor plates, and he had the same symbol on his left arm as the gray femme. "Rook, can we have some introductions?"

"Hmm? Oh, sure. Bluestreak, Blaster, and Smokescreen, this is my cohort brother, Trickflip, and his friends, Ruby," the saboteur gestured to the red femme that had followed her over to meet the Enforcers, "her spark-mate Flashfire," the hot pink and silver femme timidly waved from where she was behind the infiltrator, "and their youngling Silverbell."

The gray femme flicked a hand at the youngling behind the other SPARTAN last before turning to her brother.

"Likewise, Blaster and Smokey are Enforcers that are assigned to the patrol route around here, the cassettes are Steeljaw, Ramhorn, Eject, and Rewind, they belong to Blast', and Blue is a merchant."

Flashfire scooted a bit closer to Trickflip and her youngling. "Enforcers? Why would you…"

"These are not like Kaon's Enforcers, 'fire." The acid green and black mech wearily rubbed the back of his helm and sighed when the Enforcers gave him a sharp look for that tidbit of information. "They actually do the job their supposed to."

Rook spoke up next, her tone a bit defensive as she frowned at the femme. "They're good mechs, I've known them for a while now."

Blaster raised his optic ridges at Smokescreen, who could only shrug in reply.

"Erm… I take it your all from Kaon?" The communications expert wondered if that was where Rook was from as well.

The hot pink and silver femme nodded as the red one scoffed. "Where else would we have come from? The fighting got so bad there that we had to leave, for Bells' sake if nothing else, especially after those Decepticon rust buckets tried to deactivate me. Trickflip got us out of the city, and Rook here generously opened her home so we have someplace to get back on our pedes in."

"Speaking of which," the saboteur looked over to the merchant, "they've got next to nothing with them, Blue. I'm going to need your help in finding everything that they need."

Rook shook her helm when it looked like Flashfire wanted to argue.

"I've got nothing but empty berths in the guest rooms right now, and that's a bit too bare for a youngling to live in. If you seriously want to you can pay me back later, but as for right now I'll front you the credits to set yourselves up the right way."

"I wouldn't argue," Trickflip had given up being almost bent in half for the conversation and swung the youngling up into his arms, much to the disappointment of Ramhorn, "Rook and the rest of us make more than we could ever get around to spending on ourselves. Let her do what she wants. Besides, there really isn't a reason to refuse. You're going to need the help, at least for the first few megacycles."

"A few of the shops are still open, and I'm sure that if I don't have what they need, one of the other merchants wouldn't mind helping me out." Bluestreak had to bit his lip plate to keep himself from laughing at the rather apologetic expression on the hot pink and silver femme's faceplate. "We can go now, if you want."

The SPARTAN femme nodded at him and pointed to Ruby. "You're coming with me, since I can trust you to not keep price in your CPU when it comes to your comfort. I'm afraid that my home isn't really set up for a youngling, and I need one of you two to help out."

"You know that this little side step of yours isn't going to help, right? She'll find out how much you spend and pay you back every credit chit with or without your approval." The red femme hugged her bonded and her youngling, still in the infiltrator's arms, before trotting after Rook and Bluestreak.

Blaster tilted his helm at Eject and Rewind, and the two cassettes followed after the two femmes and the Praxian to keep an optic on them and to help carry when needed.

Trickflip looked at the pair of Enforcers, who looked back at him. "So… hi?"

"I haven't heard about you." Smokescreen crossed his arms over his chest plates and frowned at the acid green and black mech. "Why wouldn't Rook have mentioned you before?"

"Did you even know she had siblings?" Smirking at the negative shake of both Enforcers' helms, the infiltrator shifted Silverbell higher up on his hip joint. "I've heard a bit about the both of you, and have one question. About those tracking chips you're trying to use, you do know that's never going to work, right?"

He grinned wider at the surprised look the two shared.

"She can feel the magnetization you used to attach them to her."

"That little… _cheater!_ " Blaster smacked himself in the helm with his hand. "I should have noticed something like that!"

Trickflip snorted at him. "You wouldn't have noticed anything she didn't want you to. Speaking of which, are either of you missing anything? Rook tends to… collect things."

The infiltrator paused for a moment in setting the youngling down to play with Steeljaw and Ramhorn before continuing in a rather cheerful tone with a broad grin.

"Err… _other_ bots' things, that is."

\V/

"Because I'm leaving for the megacycle, 'storm. My brother has asked for my help, and he's in Simfur. That means I'll be gone for a cycle alone in total travel time, and another one or two orns while helping him out." The SPARTAN-Bots' tracker bustled around the Wrecker mech, packing up the few personal objects that had migrated their way into her office in the Autobot base. "Before you ask, 'fit has a megacycle long workshop set up with one of the medical stations. She'll be gone for longer than I will be."

The orange and black mech frowned at the femme that had only recently agreed to date him. Impactor had admitted to him that the femme had requested leave for a megacycle earlier that joor, and the mech had hurried his way to the Supply Office only to find the bronze and black femme packing up for her trip. "Simfur's kinda far, don't you think? Maybe I should come with, just in case."

Holdout made a disagreeing noise as she pulled the drawers out of her desk to double check that she had gotten everything.

"I'll be fine, and there is no way you can get leave arranged that fast. Remember what I did to that old supply mech? That's not even my favorite bit that I can do." The tracker straightened up with a grin and patted the side of the triple changer's faceplates. "I can handle myself, and what Nitro needs my help with, all on my lonesome without breaking."

Sandstorm growled irritably as he looked down at the packing box that the bronze and black femme had him hold, feeling mostly useless. "I still don't like it."

"I'm not asking you to." The SPARTAN femme smirked as she took the box from him. "Look, when I get back I should have some leave time left, we'll do whatever you want."

She had to admit the whole 'dating' thing was working out better than she feared it wouldn't. It probably was mostly due to the fact she had never dated before, she never had the time when she was a human SPARTAN, but Sandstorm had at least stopped stalking her around the base just to ask her out. There were still the odd occasions where some other bot looked at her too long and the Wrecker got protective, which was laughable to the SPARTAN seeing as she could probably take out most of the Wrecker unit in an unfair fight, but the idea of some bot protecting her was still novel enough to amuse rather than annoy her.

Brightening predictably at the bribe, Sandstorm followed her out of the Supply Office a bit more cheerfully than he went in. "So, what does your brother need help with?"

"Some mech he met not too long ago." Holdout was more interested in her projected itinerary and in making sure that it was correct before she sent it off to Warcry, than the sour expression that crossed the faceplate of the mech behind her.

"He's not trying to set you up, is he?"

"Nitro wouldn't do that to me. The mech is a bit too focused with his own 'hobbies' than with trying to set me up." The tracker snorted at the thought of the Praxian demolitions specialist trying to pull something like that on her, not aware that Sandstorm meant something totally different than what she thought. "He just needs another opinion on whether or not to trust him."

The Wrecker triple changer blinked at her back.

"Why you?" When the femme stopped in her tracks to look at him, the mech backpedaled quickly. "Not that I don't think your opinion matters… but why does it have to be you?"

Holdout gave him a long look before continuing to walk to the base's main gate.

"I'm an officer in my unit, 'storm. We may not be active at the moment, but there are still some regulations that we adhere to. With the other officers where they are, I'm the only one able to move easily at the moment," she snorted and amended her statement, "relatively easily, anyways."

Impactor, who had spotted the unusual couple from across the base's courtyard, nearly stalled at the blithe statement. "You're an officer? What the frag are you doing knocking around like a civi-bot here?"

"Because Refit was coming here," the bronze and black femme shrugged at the Wrecker Commander, "and some other reasons, most of which have to do with the type of unit we are."

Fiddling with his harpoon, the purple and gold mech frowned down at her. "One of these orns, you're going to have to tell us what unit your out of."

"Oh, please don't." Holdout turned and gave both mechs a small laugh as they stopped just outside of the base. "The last time some bot said that to one of us, the mech they were talking to almost got deactivated. Wish me luck for slag's sake."

\V/

Vos was a very striking city of interwoven skylights, bridges, spires, and the ornate hanger living units seekers tended to use when seen from the sky.

Built mainly for the seeker framed, the city of towering skyscrapers and broad expanses of glittering steel and glass reflected the dim orange, blood red, and dark violet horizon when the SPARTAN trine finally got within optic range of the city. Drax lead the way for his trine mates, flying just under the normal traffic level for seekers in the city in the altitude the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots had passed on to him when he informed the Enforcer that they were in regular comm range of the city.

Markmaker was waiting for them with Dawnglider, having arranged for some personal time by threatening the bots on dispatch duty with his own work load if they didn't give him a few free joors to meet up with his brothers. Since he had never asked for time off before, his request was hurriedly approved by his Station's Chief.

The tank was standing on one of the few high reaches accessible to ground bound bots, one of the spires jutting out of the Aero Space Division's Headquarters that had a staircase wrapped around the side for the few non-seeker framed bots that helped maintain the Division's building.

He had gotten permission to use that spire from the seeker council itself when he went in to report the trine's impending arrival along with the Enforcers' respects. "Better late than never, Drax, but it's still good to see you three."

"Sup, mech! It's been a long time since I've seen you last!" Tigerstripe clasped arms with the other tank with a broad grin only moments after his transformation to root mode, turbines hissing softly as they cooled down from the long flight.

Ground bound bot or not, the aerial tank still had fond memory files of working with the other SPARTAN-III in faraway worlds; now just scorched glass and dead rock floating in space.

The trine leader just let out a bark of laughter and steadied Spotter as the slightest seeker in the trine stumbled in the strong wind that high up before he could brace himself. "Never thought I'd see your ugly, hulking, and misshapen aft again this soon, Mark'. I thought I had just under another half of a vorn to go before I had to suffer through the sight of you."

The recon scout shuddered as he almost lost his balance again, mostly disgusted with his inability to remain on his own pedes without relying on the darker seeker's help. "Can this oh so charming banter be moved inside? I'm not built for standing around in this kind of altitude."

"Uh… over here, mechs." Dawnglider beckoned to the trine and the tank over to where she was standing in the hanger's bay doors, now insanely curious about what relation the four mechs had to one another.

They didn't act remotely how she had thought they would, considering Markmaker's frame type. In fact, nothing about them was normal, as two had bass vocalizer settings instead of the high ones that seekers used in high altitudes and generally refrained from adjusting once back on the ground, only the slim silver one had a tenor tone.

"The seeker council would like to see you and your trine as soon as you're ready, Drax." She looked over the oddly unbalanced trine, unable to see how the three worked together with such radical differences in their builds.

The dark blue and black trine leader passed the slight silver and white seeker on to the much larger white and almost gray one as he _walked_ over to her with Markmaker. The femme blinked in surprise to see the three seekers had the postures of a ground bound bots even with the characteristic talon tipped pedes of their seeker frame set, and had to admit privately to herself that it looked more dignified than the hopping gait most seekers used to get around.

The Enforcer slapped a hand hard on Drax's back plates and gripped his shoulder joint briefly, not even bothering to avoid the wing joints like he did for the femme, causing her to wince in sympathetic pain response.

"This is where I leave you four; play nice with the council now." He had to grin at the mildly annoyed look on the trine leader's faceplate as he walked away, snickering to himself as he re enabled his internal comms to see if he had any Enforcer calls.

"Right, well?" Drax pinned the femme with a look that made her nervous as his trine mates made their slow way over, Tigerstripe mocking Spotter lightly as the smaller seeker grumbled about crazy tanks, air born and ground bound, and what they could do with their so called _help_. "I would like to get this over with before the cycle is out."

"Yes sir." Dawnglider waited only long enough for the other two to reach her before hitting the controls for the hanger bay's doors and leading the way farther inside the Aero Space Division. The silver seeker sighed in relief before following in his trine's wake as the doors closed out the bracing winds trying to rip him off the high perch.

Sometimes being lighter than usual was not a good thing.

Drax ignored the stares that started out here and there then built up as he and his trine were lead down the halls, and his trine mates did the same. On the other hand Dawnglider couldn't help but notice that more and more of the seekers in the Division were turning out to see the trine that nearly took out all three of the old Air Commander's handpicked trine and did take out him.

She glared at the ones foolish enough to try and catch a glimpse of the three in front of her, but really couldn't do much about them once she passed. The seeker femme knew it would be even worse when the odd trine left, as word would have time to spread to the seekers not assigned in the building.

She finally got the opportunity she had been waiting for when she opened the door to the council room, pinning the gossiping seekers that really had other tasks to perform with a dark glare as the unbalanced trine of seekers passed her. They scattered like iron shavings exposed to the negative side of a magnet, recollecting where she couldn't see them.

Snorting at her behavior, the dark painted trine leader slid past her and into the council room.

Drax stopped only once he was in the middle of the council room, optics narrowed on the high table that was positioned before five seekers, all of whom were inspecting the dark blue and black SPARTAN and his unbalanced trine. The SPARTAN trine leader looked the five over himself, mildly wondering why it felt like he was back in the Milky Way Galaxy facing a tribunal of ONI officers for his marching orders.

There were two femmes and three mechs on the council, each of them respected and acknowledged masters in their specific field of flight.

Whiteout held the rightmost position at the council table, the only seeker to have explored most of their galaxy's weather patterns and mastered using sonar alone to fly, even though thermal up and downdrafts. A purely white seeker with a Neutral's gray optics, he normally only appeared at council meetings when something had the possibility to be about the far reaches of space he had been too. In his perusal of the trine before the council, his optics were caught and held by the very alien looking alt modes that the seekers still held onto, and the similar transformation seams that the largest and smallest seekers shared.

Next to him, Lunais held her position as the most capable in the vacuum of space. Black and red with Autobot blue optics, she was larger than her planet side crafted fellows; her frame was riddled with locks and seals that protected her systems during her jaunts out of the planet's atmosphere. More than a little miffed at the trine before them, Lunais was nonetheless intrigued at what they thought had been more important than answering their calls.

In the middle of the group, Lightning glowered at the trine, especially the dark blue and black seeker that had deactivated his protégé. Painted gold and light green with ruby red optics of a Decepticon sympathizer, he had been the last Air Commander before he passed that title to Thunderstrike. He violently hated the fact that he couldn't bring the trine up on charges of willful deactivation of a superior officer as Thunderstrike's betrayal of the Autobots' deactivated Prime prevented him from avenging his student. He was prepared to dislike the whole trine, but had to admit to himself they seemed like better seekers than that Screamer one.

To his immediate right, Hailstorm wasn't even paying attention anymore. Dark gray, blue, and silver with gray Neutral optics, she had received Dawnglider's report of the three once the femme had spotted them, and was franticly trying to find the trine's records.

She was coming up blank with every method she tried, even a physical description of the trine's members were not in any way conclusive, their unusual optic colors marked them as bots she had never seen before. She could account for every seeker still functioning, and a good number of the deactivated ones, with even a poor match to their descriptions; even the ancient lists of seekers sent out to search for more sources of energon didn't have matches for the three. As the seeker in charge of the overall welfare and training of the seekerlings, her inability to identify the three weighed heavily on her processor.

Last on the far right, Quicksilver who was known as the fastest seeker in the air, was already bored with the meeting. Greenish blue with a Neutral's gray optics, he was drumming his clawed tips on the table, wondering if the silver seeker behind the dark blue and black one was any good in a race.

Drax just arched an optic ridge as the silence continued, not at all impressed with whatever the council was trying to do. Behind him, Spotter kept his significantly more sensitive sensors on the door at their back while Tigerstripe took the opportunity to inspect the room for any possible ambushes. "Did you just drag us here for a staring contest, or is there a reason you had that femme nag us into coming here?"

Before Lightning could start interrogating the record less trine, Hailstorm drew their attention with a wave of her claws. "I have no accounts of you or your trine mates, not a single file or even a fragmented vid of any seeker built matching your description. Why?"

Pressing his lip plates together, the SPARTAN trine leader deliberated on how to answer.

Obviously, the full truth was not an option.

As disturbing as Wheeljack had personally found the SPARTANs' history, the Covert Ops assault specialist didn't want to try and imagine the reactions out of this grouping of seekers. As per the marching orders handed to the SPARTAN-Bots before most left Iacon, he also couldn't fabricate a story that would satisfy them as his Covert Ops training demanded, leaving him only the option of giving them bits and pieces of the truth until they stopped asking questions. "That isn't a pleasant story."

"We're not going anywhere anytime soon." Slouching down in his chair, Quicksilver set one elbow joint on the table and set his helm on his claws. "Might as well get it over with now."

Drax evened out his faceplate and gave the five seekers a stiff nod. "Fine, before our first stellar cycle of function we were sparknapped for a project called SPARTAN, almost sixty vorns ago now."

He noted that as the stormy painted femme sank back in her chair in horror, the white mech shot her a brief but concerned look.

"Where were you taken to?" The demand came from the black and red femme, who had hunched over the table in the first place before the trine had walked in and had to slouch even lower in her chair just to look the SPARTAN mechs' in the optics. "Do you know the coordinates?"

"I no longer know where it is exactly, but they designated the planet Reach."

A light tap on his right wing tip reminded the SPARTAN-II of the name of the planet that the class IIIs where trained on.

"When they went back for another group, they got Tigerstripe," he jerked his clawed thumb tip at the largest seeker behind him, "they took them to a planet they named Onyx. And before you ask, no they are not my original trine."

If he wanted to he could count his training team as a trine, there had been three of them, and neither of his old training squad mates had survived their SPARTAN careers.

Whiteout gave a rev of his turbines. "That much is obvious just looking at you three. I take it there have been no problems with your trine bond?"

Not quite sure what the white seeker was asking about, Drax just gave him a shrug that barely lifted his wing panels.

Hailstorm's CPU rebooted the crashed processor that had tried to switch from a search program dealing with functioning or deactivated seeker lists to the very short list of missing seekerlings in a split astrosecond. Biting her lower lip plate as the rebooted processor lagged in dealing with the half aborted and half recalled programs, she pressed one clawed hand to her helm in a mostly useless attempt to ward off the impending processor ache. "That… that answers some of my questions, but brings up so many in return."

"Frag your questions, Hail'." Lightning snapped at her. "What I want to know is why in the _PITS_ it took you this slagging long to report in."

Crossing his arms over his cockpit, the SPARTAN trine leader sneered at the older seeker. "You will have to forgive us for ignorance; there was nothing that said we had to."

He held the red optics glaring at him with his own gold ones.

Three of the council seekers looked to Hailstorm, who simply shook her helm back at them.

"If they had not been trained by us in the traditional methods, there is no way for them to have known they were supposed to come back. It's not exactly an excuse," she gave the three strange seekers a gimlet glare, "you should have at least made the attempt to find out what you're supposed to be doing, but we can't hold them responsible for not reporting if they had never been registered as seekerlings here."

"I can only act on the information I'm given. Guessing the processing method of another's CPU is a little outside of my range of skills."

Tigerstripe suppressed a groan and shared a resigned look with Spotter. Apparently, their trine leader was feeling a little out of sorts this cycle, and was going to take his ill feelings out on the seeker council. Ignoring the two SPARTANs at his back, Drax's optics narrowed on the other seekers that made up the council.

"So now that you've found holes in your standard operating procedures, can we get to why it was so fragging important to have us here in our base metals?"

Before the 'conversation' could simply degenerate to Lightning screeching at the insubordinate trine leader, Whiteout held up his claws in a gesture intended to placate the all but snarling dark blue and black seeker before them and his enraged gold and green fellow two seekers down the table.

"I think we need at least a few breems first. In fact, give us a few joors to try and place you three in our records, and sort out a few issues before we take this up again." 'Issues' was spoken with a pointed look to the seeker mech sitting in the middle.

Hailstorm didn't wait for anything as silly as an agreement from the other council members; she vaulted over the council table and hobbled over to the trine using the hopping gait normal to seekers.

"I need some additional information from the three of you. Hopefully, we can place where you were supposed to be." She gave them a timid smile.

Drax gave her a long look as she approached his trine, but hissed out something she couldn't catch and offered his arm to support her. His UNSC trained military bearing, nearly beaten into every soldier humans had since their pre-industrial era, forced him to swallow his irritation with the seeker council as a whole and adapt his behavior into something like respect for the obviously older, and higher ranking, femme. "Lead on, then."

Flattered and impressed by the abrupt switch from borderline defiance to genteel decorum, her smile widened as the other two that made up the dark seeker's trine stepped aside to let the two pass.

She tugged lightly on the arm she was holding on to and led the three out of the council room and away down the hall. "Well, at the very least we should be able to find your creators, and I can fill in any blanks that you may not be aware of operating with."

Before the four got out of range of the seekers still in the council room, they heard the older femme comment on their posture with a decent amount of surprise in her vocalizer.

Lunais watched them leave, fighting between being consummately torqued at whoever had the reinforced ball bearings to steal seekerlings and being confused over a few points that the seeker trine seemed to ignore.

They had told her that they didn't recall the coordinates of the planets they had been taken to, but neither did the trine leader inform her of whom those bots had been and if they were still functioning before the conversation had gotten redirected. Shaking her helm in bemusement, the black and red seeker femme looked over to check where the mechs of the council had gotten to.

Whiteout had pulled Lightning aside and the two were avidly discussing something, the content of the conversation seemed to not sit well with the old Air Commander. Quicksilver had already left, the shuttle mused that he had probably been the first out of the room, as he would have never let anything as mundane as a blocked door stop him when he wanted out of somewhere.

(ooo000ooo)

If Dawnglider was surprised that Drax and his trine showed back up, escorting her direct superior of all possible seekers, she had the decorum to not show any visible signs of it. Instead, the femme nodded respectfully to Hailstorm as older femme led the SPARTANs to her office and pass the younger's secretary desk.

Like any space built for seekers, it was an airy space, designed to keep the usually claustrophobic frame set from truly despising their workspace. Opened to the sky in a good third of the ceiling, data pads and servers cluttered the available space while a vid screen the along the east wall was displaying a list of designations and varied locations around and off Cybertron.

"You'll have to forgive the mess." Hailstorm busily brushed a few open backed chairs off for the three seeker mechs. "I usually have Dawn's help keep things straight, but she's been busy trying to track you all down."

Without a word, Spotter shooed her on and handled cleaning off the nearly buried office furniture. As the older femme shrugged and moved her attention to the servers, and the lists inside, Drax cleared his vocalizer to draw her attention. "I have… a relatively firm suspicion that you're not going to be able to find us on any roster or list you may have."

Hailstorm simply raised an optic ridge at the younger trine leader as she cleared some space off her desk. "This may come as a surprise to you, but I can find just about anything in my servers as long as I know what to look for."

When the dark painted seeker's set faceplate didn't change, her movements slowed as she tried to judge how the mech could make such a statement with the amount of certainty his vocalizer contained.

"You gave me a timeframe, at the very least I should be able to narrow who you might have been down to a few options."

"Be that as it may," the SPARTAN trine leader inclined his helm to her, "does it really matter who we might have been?"

"You're not curious? None of you are?"

Drax shook his helm and let his trine mates answer for themselves. It wasn't as if the Cybertronian femme could somehow pull the files of ex-human _children_ off her servers, but keeping her from looking for files that obviously didn't exist would let him decide how to break that bit of news to her himself.

Having been distracted from the conversation by the content of the numerous pads, having discovered they contained more info on seekers than he had been able to find on the public data net, Spotter required a not so gentle nudge to be brought back to the present.

The silver seeker blinked when the question was posed to him. "Not really. I mean, there were a few times when I wondered that very same question when the project was still ongoing, but it really doesn't matter now, does it?"

"I never really thought about it." Tigerstripe scorned the chairs, like the other heftily built SPARTANs he was reasonably wary of seats that hadn't been proven to stand up to the three SPARTAN tanks' considerable weight. He seated himself on the floor next to the trine leader as the recon scout progressed with sorting the stacks of data pads.

"Well… I suppose if you insist, we can put this off for another time." The older femme set the pads in her claws down with a frown. "That would just leave answering questions until the others decide they have had enough time to process."

Spotter snorted from where he had worked himself into the corner. "You give me enough time in here, and we won't have to ask."

Avidly reading what he was sorting, the SPARTAN recon scout had already dealt with a good portion of the mess in the femme's office between the desk and the far half wall.

Hailstorm quirked an optic ridge at the rate the silver mech was dealing with the data pads. "Ever think about a career change? I could use a mech of your skills."

In the time before the seeker council reconvened, neither Drax nor Tigerstripe would explain why they laughed when she said that.

(ooo000ooo)

A bit better armed with the information Spotter had dug up and shared with his trine mates over the old squad comms, Hailstorm led the SPARTAN trine back into the council room where the other four members of the seeker council were waiting.

Drax, now better behaved than he had left the council room, gave the two seeker mechs sitting on both ends of the table a curt nod at their waves.

Lightning simply glared, not at all happy with the current situation. Lunais was more interested in Hailstorm's significantly brighter mood.

"Right, well then." Whiteout cast a glance to each of the four other seekers that made up the seeker council before continuing in a more business like tone. "With the… unusual bit of this meeting taken care of, let's move on to the reason we needed you three here."

On the opposite end of the table, Quicksilver snorted at the tactful sidestep of his fellow. "What these tin wing _helicopters_ are trying to say, is that since you took out the old Air Commander, we need a new one. Rules state that if you took out the old Air Commander, you get his title."

The fastest seeker functioning ignored the sudden spate of glares directed to him and kept his optics on the trine before the council.

"So, you're here so we can see if you're up to snuff at the whole Commander bit."

Hailstorm giggled even as Lightning reached around her to smack the tactless seeker in the back of the helm. They were well used to the jade colored seeker's antics.

Lunais sighed as she took over the conversation. "It isn't just a rank, as the Air Commander makes the policies that all seekers adhere to. The council only intervenes when it is clear that the Air Commander isn't working for the good of all seekers."

"Before you say no, Drax," the darkly tri colored painted femme smiled at the three, "you should know that Starscream, as the only survivor of Thunderstrike's trine, is the only other option that we have for the new Air Commander."

Shutting his mouth components, he had been about to tell the council just where to shove it, the SPARTAN trine leader gave her a raised optic ridge in question.

"Starscream is a Decepticon. He and the old Air Commander's trine were all Decepticon affiliated, and we knew this. But since none of them overtly plotted against the old Prime, we couldn't say anything that Thunderstrike didn't want us too." Hailstorm grimaced at the seeker's part in that betrayal. "If Starscream does become the next Air Commander, as the next step that the old Air Commander was planning, he'll take the Aero Space Division to the Decepticons. And, I'm afraid that many of us are not up to Decepticon standards."

Spotter whistled from behind Drax. "Ambitious of him, is there any way he could get away with it without the title?"

"We've been trying to keep the seekers out of the conflict so far, but there are a few that seem to be just waiting for an excuse to jump to either faction." Lunais allowed, frowning herself at the back of the gold and green seeker mech at the middle of the table. "Since it seems like you are not aligned with one-"

"We're Autobot inclined."

The shuttle blinked at the abrupt interruption.

"That, and we already belong to a military unit that has our superior officer as an Autobot officer." Drax held the red optics of the mech sitting at the middle and smirked. "We're just waiting a few vorns before jumping in."

Lightning sneered back. "If you're trying to goad me into a fight, Scraplet, it ain't going to work. Since you wouldn't be the first military seeker to take the title, we just need to meet your superior officers before we reach a definite decision."

All five of the council seekers were thrown off by the very brief looks of panic that crossed the trine's faceplate. Tigerstripe looked to Spotter, not entirely sure of the truth of what he had just processed. "They want to meet Shadowdancer."

The recon scout shook his helm. "Slag is going to happen if you try to demand a meeting with her and the others. I'm sure Warcry wouldn't care, but Shadow' just can't up and leave where she's at."

"Well…" Drax flicked the tips of his wing panels to shut up his trine mates. "There is always the Report. That's only in a few more stellar cycles."

"There are three and a half stellar cycles between now and then." Spotter crossed his arms over his cockpit, taking some liberty with the trine leader's vague gesture. "That's a bit more than a few."

"Agreed. We'll meet your officers in three and a half stellar cycles then." Whiteout smirked himself at the rather surprised expressions on the trine's faceplates. "Until then, we'll postpone the selection process for the next Air Commander and get you three trained up in seeker habits. Hailstorm?"

"All in favor?"

(ooo000ooo)

Markmaker burst out laughing.

"I'm with Spot' on this, frag you and your so called help." Drax punched the other SPARTAN in the arm, leaving behind a dent and a smear of dark blue paint on gunmetal gray.

The Enforcer didn't even bother to stop his snickering.

"Common, Drax! There are some definite funny bits in that story." Setting down his cube of energon, the 2IC threw a reassuring grin at the very worried looking bartender across the length of flat metal that served as a bar. "I'll take it then that you and the trine are sticking around for a bit?"

The seeker framed SPARTAN huffed out a sigh. "Spot' and Tiger' are off to collect the _ATHENS_ , they left a few joors ago. We'll stay there seeing as you're in a barracks."

The trine leader drew one clawed hand down his faceplate before picking up his own cube, one that the tank had ordered for him when he commed in a request to meet up.

"We apparently need to be retrained, as we have some habits that just shock the poor seekers on the council."

"Considering where the frag we were and what we've been doing, I'm not all too surprised." Markmaker snickered again at the very near pout that crossed the trine leader's faceplate. "Common, it can't be all that bad."

"Define bad." Shaking his helm, the dark painted seeker looked around briefly. "Dawnglider's been tailing me around trying to shove some history files up my intakes, Hailstorm is insisting that she look up where we are in her records, Lunais, and you'd think she wouldn't really care about planet bound seekers, has been asking me about what parts of the galaxy I've seen, and Whiteout's been asking the same slagging thing. At least Quicksilver just wants to race Spot'."

"What about that last one?"

Drax blinked as he placed what the other SPARTAN was talking about. "Lightning isn't that bad, shockingly enough. I mean, he hates us because we were the ones that took out his former student, but he puts that behind him when working with us on the whole trine protocols that we apparently tend to ignore. He's a very… honorable old solider type."

Markmaker's optic ridges rose at the tone of respect in the seeker's vocalizer. "I thought he was a Decepticon sympathizer?"

"He is. Doesn't mean he approves of the more violent tendencies that the 'Cons have, but his personal philosophy runs more to the 'Cons than it does to the 'Bots"

"Hmmm." The Enforcer looked down into his nearly empty cube as he processed the very unusual situation that the seekers were in.

Drax and the others were not originally seekers, but informing the seeker council of that might be more than they were willing to take on simple faith. Likewise, with the orders Warcry handed out, the trine couldn't lie and say they were seekers for their whole function. Any normal Cybertronian would take that statement and think that the trine had been reformatted into seekers, something that wasn't too unusual in Cybertron.

"Well, you're just screwed then."

Drax snorted. "Thanks… I think."

\V/

Shadowdancer booted her processors from her recharge cycle and onlined her optics, only to frown at her left arm.

She was missing her left forearm armor plate, again.

Optic ridges drawing together, the SPARTAN-Bots' XO drew a clawed fingertip along the exposed wiring before swinging her pedes to the floor and looking around for both her missing sparkling and armor plate. "Kynaite?"

Clicks drew her attention down, and the Praxian femme looked under her berth to find her sparkling sitting on the floor, her missing electric blue armor plate next to him. _Figures._

Shadowdancer watched as the sparkling pulled another of the small tools concealed in the back of that armor plate out and fiddled with whatever it was he had found to work on.

As the blue and silver sparkling twisted around to grab another tool, he caught sight of his adoptive carrier watching him. With what sounded like an embarrassed twitter, Kynaite tried to hide what he was working on from her gold optics.

She arched an optic ridge at him, but simply extended a clawed hand and looked away.

"Fine, but I will need my armor this cycle. So common, let's go." The Praxian wiggled her claws at him.

With a pout, the sparkling reassembled his carrier's armor plate, putting away all those conveniently small tools back where she had them and dragged the armor plate back to her. Shadowdancer picked both him and her armor up, setting the sparkling on the berth as she reattached the armor plate, after checking to ensure the tools were back in place.

"You know, one of these orns I'm going to see what your so intent on keeping from me."

Kynaite chittered with a decent amount of annoyance at her. It was supposed to be a surprise for her, and looking would ruin that.

"I'm not too good with surprises, Scraplet." The XO smiled a bit softly at the confused click that the sparkling directed to her. "There have been a few too many not so nice surprises in my function."

The sparkling considered that for a moment. What if he promised that it was a really good surprise?

Shadowdancer snorted in amusement as she picked him up again so they could leave for the orn. "Then I guess you have a few more cycles to work on this surprise."

Kynaite twittered, relieved that his project was safe.

Her lip plates twisted in a smirk as she opened her front door and walked out of their home.

Since the bar didn't open until later in the cycle, the Praxian took the sparkling to the Gygax Youth Centers for a few joors every orn.

Kynaite didn't really socialize with the other Cybertronian younglings, but he did use the time to either sketch out a few things or build structures and objects out of the sparkling toys. Shadowdancer would usually either take a data pad to work on or simply watch him while they were there.

Much to the confusion of the workers at the Youth Centers, the third favorite pastime of the blue and silver sparkling was taking bits of his carrier's armor off and tinkering with her systems.

The Praxian would either tell him to replace whatever he had played with or ensure that her systems still worked correctly whenever he did, showing next to no concern that the sparkling was removing some wires from her leg. The habit made the caretakers very nervous, but Kynaite didn't show any inclination to muck about the systems of any bot other than his carrier.

Shadowdancer couldn't really see their problem, except maybe that they were nervous about the reaction time lag from having her sparkling messing with her primary motor control relay, and she couldn't even see _that_ bothering her much considering that she had two backup systems in case the first failed.

This cycle, the XO placed Kynaite down in the Youth Center's playground and went to go talk to one of the caretakers. "I'm expecting a mech later, a dark green and black one by the designation Orpheus. Let me know when he gets here."

The rather nervous femme nodded and retreated as fast as she could. Rumors around the caretakers' offices had the femme as a member of the Decepticon supporters, and no bot really wanted to be the one that found out for sure.

When Orpheus was led into the same room Kynaite, and by extension Shadowdancer, had wandered into, he was trying hard not to smirk at the Head of the Covert Ops team. "Do you know what these bots are saying about you?"

"Do I care?" Her door-wings twitched minutely as the mech took a seat next to her. "As long as they don't bother me, I really don't."

"And here I thought you were wondering about the stability of my CPU."

"No, this is something else." Shadowdancer passed the datapad over to the assassin. "Tell me what you think."

Arching an optic ridge, Orpheus nonetheless took the proffered pad and read over what the XO had pulled up. "…it wouldn't surprise me. How did you twig in on this?"

"When Kynaite had his bout with that virus. Technically, with how this bond thing is set up as well as the extra methods of security I have, my firewalls are the ones that deal with our virus protection. If I was the one to get infected, why didn't my firewalls simply burn the slag out before _he_ got sick? So I did a little digging, and came up with that."

"So… you're processing that you already have it."

"I think we both have it, and possibly Trick' as well." Shadowdancer looked to her sparkling, lip plates twitched in a small smile. "He probably has it as well."

Orpheus raised his other optic ridge. "That would also make it possible that your two civilians, Dreadnought and Zephyr, have this."

The XO looked back at him levelly.

"Conceivably, _half of Cybertron_ has it. I can't point finger joints yet, I want both Spotter and Ratchet to look it over before I do, but this," she poked at the back of the data pad he held, "looks like an indoctrination virus."


	14. Chapter 14

Roulette had switched shifts with another Enforcer just to be the Enforcer on hand when something happened, which would require an officer to be called to the Merchant's Square, a block of rather profitable businesses in the heart of the Simfur merchant's district.

It didn't even have to be a problem at this point, she just really wanted to figure out what in the _Pits_ was going on.

A Praxian mech by the name of Nitro had called in a report about two bounty hunters once, and seemed more than just a little apathetic when told that the Enforcers had not caught the one bounty hunter who trashed his store front and got away.

Roulette was positive that the Praxian knew more than he was telling, but finding out what he knew was harder than she had counted on.

Until she got a call that required the presence of an Enforcer Sergeant of her rank, Roulette took her time wandering around the merchant's district and subtly inquiring around about the tan and gray Praxian that ran the parts/upgrade shop on the second level of the Merchant's Square.

Nearly every bit of gossip that she got was either about how the mech had helped out some of the other merchants in the area or about the rather mysterious origins of the mech himself. Some of the rumors were down right ridiculous, as some pinned the mech to belong to a group of military builts that once swept in at the nick of time and saved Iacon and the then two Primes from deactivation singled handedly.

Trying to pick through the tidbits of Intel that the other merchants were more interested in spreading around like gossip, she nearly missed the sight of a bronze and black femme that had the same glyph painted on her left arm as the Praxian merchant calmly weaving her way through the mid-orn traffic on a path that would take the femme pass the Enforcer. Roulette jerked upright, giving the merchant femme she had been listening to an apologetic grin as she hurried away.

The Enforcer trailed the femme down a few streets, noting that she walked in the same manner that the Praxian did. They both didn't just wander to and fro, using the method of other Cybertronians in pinging others' comm signals to ensure that they wouldn't run into any bot, the two looked around when they walked, keeping an optic on both the flow of traffic and their surroundings. The Enforcers trained bots to do that, but neither struck her as the type of ex-Enforcers that had been taught to do that.

Watching, she wondered about the relations of the bots that had the same symbol as the femme wandered her way into Nitro's shop. Roulette didn't have the authority to barge into the Praxian's store and demand answers, but she could at least observe for a few breems.

(ooo000ooo)

"What did you do to that Enforcer femme?" Holdout didn't even bother with formalities as she embraced her 'brother' enthusiastically.

Nitro, instead of fighting his way free from the unwanted contact, noted the stern tone in the officer's vocalizer and looked over her shoulder plates as the slightly taller femme lifted him off the floor.

He caught sight of the Enforcer femme that had been haunting around recently and snorted. "I'm not bugging her. That's her problem with me."

The tracker set the demolitions specialist down.

"Seriously? We just can't win, can we?" She laughed in wry amusement. "First Rook and her Enforcers, they wanted her to leave them alone, now you and yours, they wanted you to bother them."

"She isn't causing any problems, just poking around." Shrugging a bit helplessly, the tan and gray Praxian tugged himself out of the femme's reach, door-wings flicking minutely. "We'll have to waste a bit of time hanging around until she leaves, but other than that are you ready to meet my unwilling guest?"

Holdout gave a dismissive wave of one hand. "First things first. What kind of history do you have for this mech?"

"Axel is a bounty hunter, one that apparently takes after dear old creator. Normally, he goes after the bots with bounties that happen to run around the far reaches of the separate territories. Given his rate of return with the bots he's been sent after, he should be a decent tracker considering the sheer amount of blank terrain between cities here." Nitro flicked off his open sign, frowning slightly at the dust trail the SPARTAN-Bot's Supply Officer had tracked in with her. "From the looks of what Spotter dug up for me, this was his first foray into working for either faction. Shockwave contacted him and another bounty hunter, one by the designation of Copper, and had them work together to pick out where and what we are."

"And this led him to trying to pick a fight with a SPARTAN?" Taking a seat on one of the chairs left out for possible shoppers that wanted to make comparisons between parts the tracker kicked her dusty pedes up onto one of the display cases, correctly identifying the reason the Praxian was frowning in the first place.

Shooting her an un-amused glare, the demolitions specialist smacked his hand against her pedes, knocking them off the display. "Don't do that, unless you want to volunteer to clean. And… not exactly. Their orders were to apprehend one or two of us and ask some questions. What, I haven't asked yet. But they attacked me with the intent of either off lining me and sending my frame off to Shockwave, or disabling me and asking some questions."

"Is she gone yet?"

Nitro locked the shop's front doors as he took a quick look out. "Yep."

(ooo000ooo)

Axle whistled at the bronze and black femme that followed Nitro into the tiny underground room. "Well hello, _gorgeous_."

"Keep it up, and I know a certain Wrecker that will be having _words_ with you." The tracker gave him a grim smile as he wiped any expression off his faceplate.

Nitro blinked at her back as he shut the door. "You finally gave that mech a chance? When the slag did this happen?"

Holdout shrugged dismissively, trying hard to keep the silly grin off her faceplate.

"Err… a few decacycles ago when we, me and 'fit that is, had to think of some way to keep 'storm from finding 'force's presence in our flat." She cleared her vocalizer sharply and looked down to the bounty hunter still chained to the floor. "So… Nitro tells us you're interested in working for us."

"I'm interested in anything that gets me out of here."

Axel raised his still chained hands and showed the femme the circle of bare metal that had been rubbed clear of any paint that had once been on his wrist joints.

"Nice as his accommodations are, I would like to get out and stretch my wheels now and again. Although," and here the mech tilted his helm to the side, "I have absolutely no complaints with the quality of care I've received."

The tracker blinked as Nitro started to laugh. She looked from one mech to the other, wondering when this had happened. "So, I take it the both of you have no issue with each other?"

They didn't from what she could see, but corroboration was always nice.

The SPARTAN mech merely shrugged as the bounty hunter looked up at her. "I like his humor, does that win me nice mech points?"

"Not really."

Holdout smirked as she drew a flat length of metal from out behind her right shin plate and simply sat herself next to the bound mech. The metal was worked into a handle-less combat knife, in the same style that the SPARTANs had trained with long before Refit had even been programmed.

The tracker now took this knife and stabbed it into the floor next to the bounty hunter. "But it makes a few things easier for me."

Axel looked from the femme with the knife to Nitro, who looked a little confused himself as to what the other SPARTAN planned on doing. "Uh… that's a very pretty knife?"

"I know that style." The demolitions specialist tilted his helm to the side as he examined the serrated edge. "Wasn't that the type used by the ODSTs?"

Holdout shrugged. "Don't know, don't care. Works for what I need."

She smiled rather evilly at the bounty hunter.

"Now then, this can go one of two ways. You can do this voluntarily, and hand over what you know, or you can resist and this will end painfully for you and I'll get to rip the Intel out of your cold dead frame. At this point in time, we are not going to trust a bot that tried to attack one of our soldiers on his word alone. Shadow' put her pede down about bots like you, especially considering what else she found out about Shockwave recently."

Nitro opened his mouth components to ask, but the tracker shot him a look and he kept his silence with a confused flutter of his door-wings. Axel looked from the grim smiling tracker femme to his wary looking captor, and sighed. "Look all you want, femme. I ain't going to do something as stupid as resist."

The SPARTAN femme's mouth components twisted into a more normal looking smile. "Good, because I'm not too sure if I have the tanks to try and force some bot in giving up what they don't want me to see."

"You… _damn_ , femme. You're cruel." The bounty hunter shook his helm. "I believed you though, nearly scared the slag out of me when you stabbed that shank into the floor. I take it he's going to be doing the looking?"

Axel jerked his helm to indicate the Praxian.

"No," shaking her helm, the tracker indicated herself with the point of her makeshift knife after she yanked it out of the floor, "it'll be my systems you'll be hooked to, but the ones looking would be Spotter and Shadowdancer. They'll bounce your processor off the tactical link and pick you apart. Good news is the only thing their looking for is Shockwave, bad news is they ain't going to stop until they get all the way through your memory core and a good bit of your personality matrix."

The bound mech snorted at her. "That's better than what would happen if Shockwave ever figures out I'm crossing him. I may not have met him in person before, but I do know the mech's reputation. When is this happening?"

"Later, once both Spot' and Shadow' have a few breems, or joors, to spare to check you out." Holdout replaced the length of metal back behind her right shin plate and pulled out a few cubes of _ATHENS_ energon from her subspace. "So… out of curiosity, what do you intend to do for us, officially?"

The bounty hunter cautiously accepted the cube and gave it a quick check. It was the same type that he normally got, the strange mid-grade was sealed and seemed un-tampered with.

"Not too sure, but I could try working as a courier or something similar. I probably will need a new paintjob, since Nitro reported me in to the Enforcers." Cracking open the cube, the mech took a draught of the softly glowing green energon inside. "That, or if he wants, I can work as an assistant-"

Nitro blinked as Axel suddenly slumped to the floor, completely offline, right in the middle of a sentence. "Damn, where did you learn that one?"

"You'd be surprised at the amount of information medics are given that can be used in not so legal ways. It's a bit of and additive that is usually for those that need a higher lead intake, too much in a normal bot's fuel and you risk knocking the intake measuring system in a feedback loop that crashes the bot." The bronze and black femme suppressed a smirk at the rather impressed look the other SPARTAN mech gave her. "But this is another one of Shadow's stipulations. She is not amused that this Shockwave mech popped up again and is not willing to take chances."

"So he's going to be out of it for the whole time?"

Holdout shrugged. "Pretty much. Roll him over, would you? Let's get this over with."

(ooo000ooo)

The next thing Axel knew, his CPU booted up out of a recharge cycle and he was staring at something other than the ceiling in the room Nitro had held him in for the last megacycles.

Additionally, his processors hurt… a _lot_.

With a groan, the bounty hunter rolled to his right, taking painful note that both the lengths of chain that bound his arms and legs had been removed. Slamming his pedes on the ground, the bounty hunter looked around briefly before stumbling out of the room that he had been placed in.

He followed the sounds of a femme's and a mech's vocalizer father down the short hall and stumbled his way into the living room of the cramped living unit behind the Praxian's shop space. "That last sip was a doozy."

Nitro snorted and helped him to a chair set around the only table, giving an unapologetic Holdout a wry glare and a sharp flick of his door-wings. "I wasn't informed that would happen. If you want to be torqued with some bot, Hold's your femme."

"Hey! That was on orders. Hate Shadow', I don't think she'd care."

Axel half powered his optics just to keep the glare of the mid orn lights from hurting his aching processors even more. "How about if you tell me if I passed your unit's little test or not."

"Test?" The Praxian tapped the side of the bounty hunter's helm as he passed him a cube of normal Simfur produced energon. "That wasn't a test."

The non-SPARTAN irritably smacked away the demolitions specialist's hands as he inspected the new cube. He would be damned if they got him again with whatever they pulled.

"Give him a moment. Shadow can be downright sneaky about this slag, but there are always the telltale signs that she did _something_." The tracker gave the very confused mech a grin. "How's the ordering system in your processor?"

"I don't have…" Axel blinked, sure that his files in his processors had _never_ been that neat before. As the pain of a forced entry into his processors faded, the sheer amount of rearranging that had gone on while he was out of it surprised him. "How long was I off-line? It looks like you _defragmented_ _all_ of my hard drives."

"Eh… since last off-cycle. Kinda surprised me, but the others were done after three joors." The bronze and black femme rubbed the back of her helm sheepishly. "I may have miscalculated the amount of the additive that I needed to give you."

"Miscalculated? More like you gave him a does calibrated for a SPARTANs' system." Nitro glared at the officer, before catching the very confused look on the other mech's faceplate and trying to reassure him. "Shadow' and Spot' only found what you said, so they're prepared to accept you as a necessary evil. In other words, you've been hired."

Axel glared at the both of them. "There had better be a good reason for this. Now then, I think I've been good enough for the vorn. Can one of you two tell me what is so important that you'll dip into not so legal methods to keep your secret?"

The bronze and black femme smiled at him. "We're war bots. Purpose built war bots, with some very unique augmentations."

Neither Nitro nor Holdout looked away from the bounty hunter's optics, instead they kept their own oddly colored optics on him.

"Can you prove it?" Axel said slowly, wondering if the two needed to be checked in to the nearest medic's office.

"Well, that depends on what you think is proof."

The tracker suddenly smirked, something that had the bounty hunter instantly wary.

"I could rip out my primary motor control relays and walk around for you using the secondary, or even the third, backup relay. I could also pick you up and bend you like you're made of tin." She pulled a datapad out of her subspace instead. "Or I can give you this."

"And 'this' is?" The non-SPARTAN mech took the pad anyways, and read the list of what seemed like optional frame upgrades.

Nitro peered over his shoulder and snickered with a few twitches of his door-wings. "Well… that just so happens to be the list of irregular systems in my frame at the moment."

The Praxian tilted his helm at the SPARTAN femme sitting across the table.

"I take it to mean that he's allowed to parse through my systems?"

"Whatever's needed." She agreed, sipping another cube of energon. Since she planned on leaving once Axel rejoined the rationally processing, and considering the drain she had already gone through, the tracker would need the extra energy just to make it back before her leave ended so she would have the time she promised to Sandstorm. "If that doesn't do it, you got Ratchet's assistance waiting back in Iacon, if you two really want to go that far out of your way and bug the Head Medic of Iacon for his opinion on us."

Axel frowned at the pad he was reading, and twisted around in his chair to deftly unlatch the right arm armor of the Praxian. Nitro tensed at the abrupt movement, but refrained from lashing out like his SPARTAN trained responses wanted him to.

A few jerks of his door-wings and the SPARTAN mech sighed. "Well, you really shouldn't do that in mixed company, Ax'. Whatever is Hold' going to think about your morals now?"

"She would say that was rather fast. Are you sure you haven't done that before?"

The bounty hunter ignored them, looking into the arm assembly for the extra wires. He wasn't a medic, but in his line of work medical skills were always helpful and he had enough training to recognize an optimized layout even without a blueprint to compare the list to.

However… Cybertronians were not built that way. There was no need, seeing as there was a large source of energon _in_ the planet, within easy reach.

He jerked back as the final wires he had been looking for showed up, neatly tucked nearly inside of an odd colored support strut. They were a part of the third motor relay synapse, and only worked when the first two were severed completely, if the data pad was to be believed.

"…I do so hope this isn't the only explanation that I will be given." Axel replaced the armor plate he had almost forgotten he had nearly absently; processors running over everything that Nitro had already told him and comparing it to what he had just now learned. "I'll take this on such flimsy proof, but if you seriously want me to believe that all of you are war built, I need some additional verifications."

The demolitions specialist flexed his arm assembly as he nodded. "Three and some stellar cycles, I head to Iacon for the vorn's report. You can come with, I suppose, and meet the others there."

Holdout smirked as she got up to her pedes. "That, and you and whoever else we drag there will get the other half of our so called horror story. But for right now, I got a mech waiting for me back home. Have fun you two!"

The tracker left them there, ducking her slightly taller frame under the door and out of the two mechs' sights.

"So," Nitro looked over to the still confused Axel, "having second thoughts yet?"

The bounty hunter snorted and set his helm on the table. "What the frag did you all put me under with? Slag _still_ hurts."

\V/

Passing one of the training rooms late one cycle, Warcry had to slow down and admire Silentforce's method of teaching.

Since the stoic mech still couldn't use his vocalizer, the defensive specialist relied more on showing then telling. This really didn't help out those he was teaching very much. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker, against the warnings each SPARTAN in Iacon tried to give them, had signed themselves up to be the first trainees for the SPARTAN-Bot Unit.

This cycle, they were with Silentforce learning the correct method of inspecting a building for structural weak points that could be used to collapse the structure if a barricade was needed.

The tank braced himself against the closed door as he watched through a convenient window that let watchers watch without accidentally becoming part of the training exercise.

The training room had holo-emitters, a veritable light show that could change the plain room into whatever was needed by the trainers. Silentforce had dredged up a city in the middle of being attacked by the Covenant from his memory core, something alien enough to throw off the twins who were expecting a more Cybertronian looking scenario.

The city built for organics was limited to a few streets in the training room, but Silentforce's memory file contained enough that the three had almost four city blocks to work with. The sky was burned orange with yellow clouds with the purple and black ships of the Covenant suspended above, most of the gray stone and steel buildings had holes melted or blasted through them, and the streets were clogged with either panicking organic humans, the occasional military unit or the invading Covenant forces.

The odd explosion occurred and rocked the entire scene, incurring more panicking from the organic images and more confusion from the few comm lines that Silentforce recalled listening in to.

Warcry had to hide a grin as the sheer confusion that painted the faceplates of both frontline warriors. Silentforce wasn't amused at the failure to even find a defensible position and he paused the scenario, pinning both mechs with a glare. He opened the doors just to hear the next bit.

"This is confusing. What the frag is this?" Sideswipe was as disgusted as his trainer, but more so at the organic images he had brought up. The world was obviously under attack, but he couldn't pin what organic race the SPARTAN was showing him. " _Where_ is this?"

"Does it matter?" The tank gave all three mechs a grin, having surprised the twins but merely annoying the bodyguard specialist. "Point is that you will not always have time to process what's happening. What will you do then?"

"Stop being so slagging picky and simply take down a structure or two to shield one side of our position." Sunstreaker glared at both SPARTAN mechs, only to drop his attitude for surprise as both nodded at him.

"Sound reasoning, but where?"

Taking cue from his brother, the silver swordmech pointed to a dead end street that already had buildings that where half collapsed over the street. "Over there, only one clear method of attack is possible down here."

Warcry nodded his helm in approval. "Why can't you process that in the middle of battle?"

"It's confusing." Sideswipe protested. "You gave us no warning at all that this slag was going to change!"

Silentforce simply arched an optic ridge at them as the SPARTAN tank started to laugh.

Sunstreaker smacked his brother upside the helm. "Smooth, Sides'. How can he when he isn't supposed to be here to help us?"

Before Sideswipe could retort, Warcry entered the room fully and spoke up forcefully, drawing the twin's attention. "That is irrelevant. Silentforce's inability to speak out loud isn't the issue. You two are hesitating, and that's the problem. In the middle of battle it's always confusing, so you need to look once, note as many details as you can, and keep that in your processor even when the slag changes on you before your optics so you know where your options are."

"I'd like to see you do this." The silver swordmech grumbled.

Both SPARTANs exchanged looks. With where Silentforce had paused the image, a SPARTAN-III with the numbers 'G-337' stamped across his chest plates was visible just across the street, frozen in mid run with a rocket launcher perched on his shoulder and a ragged battalion of UNSC marines behind him, intent on joining the action a few streets from where the five now stood. "Where do you think he got this memory file from?"

"Some other bot, cause I can't see him here." Gesturing around, Warcry had to bite his lower lip plate when the silver twin actually managed to include the human version of Silentforce across the street.

: _I'm giving up for the cycle, sir. This is just going to go around in circles if I try and press them._ : The defensive specialist shook his helm and typed in the order to kill the scenario into the control panel next to the door as he left the twins with the SPARTAN-Bot CO.

Warcry inspected both trainees with barely concealed amusement as the organic world around them faded back to the plain gray walls of the training room. The three Autobot SPARTAN mechs were running the two _ragged_ , with weapon drills in the early cycle joors, combat spars directly after, a single joor for them to refuel while they instructed them in tactical observations at mid orn, then into training much like what they had just gotten through with until there was a few joor for them to rest before they got up and did it all over again.

Galeforce and Silentforce were mildly impressed that the two had hung on as long as they had, especially since they had held the same routine for the last decacycle. Somehow, Sunstreaker still had the energy after it all to ensure that his paintjob was as good as it was, and he probably was the one to nudge Sideswipe in taking care of his own paint as well.

The tank shook his helm in fond exasperation. "Alright. You didn't do as well as the rest of us, but I suppose that was to be expected."

Sideswipe blinked at him. "What?"

"We only had a bare decacycle or two of training, same as you have now." Warcry gave both a sly grin. "Congratulations, you survived."

He clanged his hands together just in case the two had missed his point.

"Good." Ignoring his brother and what was now officially his commanding officer, Sunstreaker collapsed onto his aft in the middle of the room with a graceless thump.

"Did you do this as well?" The silver swordmech shook his helm as he joined his twin on the ground, moving gentler since his slower reaction times earned him quite a few dents in the spars.

The tank nodded his helm.

"It was both harder and easier. We had… well, Galeforce and I had about forty or so that pulled through the _training_ with us, not including the number we lost after… well, we lost them. 'force and the others had about three hundred and fifty in their training class. There were a few numbers of both those classes that couldn't do it, couldn't pull through and ignore what was going on just to complete their training." Warcry dropped to the floor with them. "There are a few stellar cycles before you'll meet the others, and there is only one in the unit that never went through training like this."

"Slag me, I feel like I went a few rounds with big bot Op'." Sideswipe flexed his left arm, wincing as a few gears protested and ground together. "Now what?"

"Well… there are another few things that need to be done." Warcry glanced over to the doors as they opened again, revealing the other two SPARTANs carrying some cubes of the _ATHENS_ grade energon. "First and foremost, is that you can stop with the routine that we've been pressing you in. The rest of this slag we learned on our own, in the middle of battle. We're not expecting you two to learn it the same way we did."

The SPARTAN-Bots' CO took the cube that Galeforce passed to him.

"Second, there are a few frame issues that need to be dealt with, but that's between us and Ratch'. Last but not least, you need to know where we came from."

The combat engineer and the bodyguard specialist sat on the floor with them, and the gray and green SPARTAN took a sip of his own cube before taking up the thread of the conversation. "There are a few problems with that, but you'll learn what we are when you meet the others. So for the few stellar cycles we got left, we'll continue like this, but at a much slower pace."

Silentforce held up a finger joint to attract attention.

: _There is the AI's graduation, most of us are trying to clear enough time to be there._ : He inclined his helm to the CO. : _Us as well, sir._ :

"Huh, yeah. Wonder how many are going to show up for that?" The combat engineer looked to the tank as well.

Warcry just shrugged. "Depends on travel arrangements. Shadow's got hers in, she's brining an ex-Enforcer with her and the bitlit. So has Nitro, but he has to deal with that bounty hunter tagging along and he's abstaining from showing up in Central. Rook's been begging to bring her own Enforcers with, and Drax is bringing the entire seeker council with him. Trick' is debating if he should bring a pair of femmes and their bitlit with, and Hold' is dithering over her Wrecker mechs."

The SPARTAN-Bots' CO snorted.

"I'm kinda surprised there are so many civilians coming with this vorn. We may just have to hold this every vorn we're out there."

Sideswipe looked from the red and black mech to the green and black tank. "What's AI? Or should I say who?"

Silentforce had finally given them his comm frequency a few cycles ago, and the twins had heard his comment.

"Who," Galeforce inclined his helm to them, "Refit, our soon to be team medic. She's graduating from the Academy's medic classes in two stellar cycles. Afterwards, she's coming here to complete her training under Ratchet. Her call sign is AI, for reasons you'll learn later."

"How many are in this fragging unit?" Sunstreaker scowled at the three SPARTANs as he finally turned his attention from inspecting his scratches to the cube of energon they had brought in.

"Seventeen, if you don't count Refit," Warcry smirked at the surprised looks, "eighteen if you want to, then there's also the XO's Scraplet. So, there are nineteen SPARTANs left, counting Kynaite by grace of his carrier."

Silentforce snorted in disgust. : _If that wasn't scary enough for you though, there used to be thousands of us. Now, there are less than four hands full of SPARTANs._ :

\V/

"Where are we going?" Zephyr watched her closest femme friend as she packed up a few things from her living unit.

"Elsewhere." Shadowdancer smirked at the un-amused glare the black and silver helicopter gave her. "Common, it'll be _fun_."

The ex-Enforcer did not look convinced. "Coming from you, that's more of a reason to stay home than to jaunt out in parts unknown. You haven't even told me what we're doing packing up and leaving like this."

"Do you need a reason?" The SPARTAN-Bots' XO ducked to peer under her berth. "Kynaite? If you want to take whatever you're working on with us, I need it now."

A burst of irritated chitters answered the Praxian, and her adopted sparkling appeared dragging something he had covered and wrapped up with the thermal blanket he wanted to take with him. He pouted up at his carrier, sitting his tiny chassis next to his bundle and crossing his thin arms over his chest plates.

Shadowdancer clicked her glossa at him, an action that never failed to amuse both the helicopter and the sparkling. "If you want her to, Zeph' can take it, but we are almost ready to leave and I need you where I can see you."

"Shadow'! This isn't… I mean, I can't _just_ -!"

The electric blue and black Praxian looked over to her femme friend and simply raised an optic ridge. "I am your boss, I've hired you to help me care for Kynaite when I need help, and with a business trip like this one, I'm going to need some help."

Hands on her hip joints, the ex-Enforcer tilted her helm at her employer with a flutter of her helicopter blades. "So… business trip?"

"Whatever floats your ballasts." Shadowdancer shrugged with a few dismissive twitches to her door-wings.

Zephyr's mouth components dropped open.

"That! …aww. This is _so_ many levels of _unfair_." The helicopter made a frustrated sound and was prepared to simply leave the room and not look back, but she took one look down at the sparkling that her friend had adopted and lost her will to walk away. "And that's even more unfair, 'naite."

Kynaite dropped his pout and copied his carrier's actions, he shrugged then pushed his bundle closer to her, giving it a few good nudges until the ex-Enforcer picked it up and placed it in her subspace.

"I have half a processor to mutiny."

" _Well_ ," the Praxian pretended to think about that statement, she even adopted a thinking pose to really encourage thought, "I have it on good authority that we are going to be using one of the few unmonitored paths in and out of the city. You being you… that is, an ex- _Enforcer_ like yourself would have no interest at all about the _illegal_ methods your boss knows to circumvent the Decepticon blockade."

She nodded to herself, not even requiring a look at the femme behind her to know she was glaring at her back.

"Then again, there are also rumors about this little trip of mine, that it is either to go see my youngest cohort sister graduate from the Academy or to see my plentitude of other siblings in a get together in a very… _famous_ location."

Zephyr glared at her employer's back and door-wings, that didn't even have the grace to twitch under her less than happy look. " _You_ … are _evil_ …"

She had encountered the Praxian's bent in manipulating others before, but had never been the one _being_ influenced before this.

Shadowdancer twisted around to give her a wicked smirk. "I'm a femme. Even worse, I'm a SPARTAN femme. That should have been warning enough for you."

\V/

Trickflip pursed his lip plates as he watched the chaos around him. Sometimes, being the only mech in the living unit above Rook's dojo was a _very bad thing_. He had finally bit the bullet when the saboteur propositioned her Enforcers and had invited Ruby, Flashfire, and Silverbell with them to Central and then Iacon.

Now, he was regulated to being a youngling sitter in the corner of the upper floor sky walks, watching two femmes race from room to room trying to find what they needed for a trip so soon in their tenure in Praxus. Silverbell sat in his lap, her second favorite place to be when 'home', playing with a digital puzzle box Rook had gotten her for her second spark orn anniversary two megacycles ago.

Said saboteur was out meeting with the Enforcer Chief of Smokescreen's Station, summoned to explain why the Military Commander of the Autobots himself requested specific Enforcers to escort what was supposed to be four civilian bots and a youngling on a trip to see relatives.

The infiltrator set the bottom of his jaw plate on the crest of Silverbell's helm with a sigh. "I hope you're not as high maintenance as those two when you're older."

"Why?" The youngling looked up at him from a particularly hard twist of her puzzle. "Is that bad?"

"Eh… it can be." The SPARTAN mech held out a hand and waved it side to side. "Rook's not high maintenance, but keeping up with that femme is like your box. Twisty like."

Silverbell looked from her creators to her puzzle and back to mech she was using like a chair. "So, is it a good thing? I'm confused."

Trickflip's lip plates twisted up in a smile. "I'm sure we'll see when you're older. It's not something to worry about now; there are still another vorn to go before you have to bother yourself about that."

"Then why bring it up?" The youngling pouted at the mech that had all but taken over as her Guardian.

"Cause I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently." The SPARTAN mech laughed.

(ooo000ooo)

Rook blinked politely, and damn if the Enforcer Station Chief couldn't say anything else about the femme who was polite.

He glowered at her, having subjected the gray femme to two joors of arguments that he should be told where his officers were being ordered to. She sat slumped in the chairs before him; one pede kicked up on his spotless desk, a smirk on her faceplate, and simply nodded at intervals in his rant. "Isn't there any slagging thing that you can tell me about _why_ Ultra Magnus requested two of my best officers?"

"Sorry, classified." If anything, he would swear the smirk got bigger as he glared at her. Suddenly, she surprised him by sighing. "Look, if it will get me out of here faster, I do have some things to pack you know, I'll tell you this: escort is the _only_ thing they'll be doing."

The old Enforcer pinned her with a look that had made lesser bots lubricate themselves when he had still been on the streets. She simply smiled back at him. "If that's all you have to say for yourself, know this: I'm holding you responsible for their condition. I get them back in any worse shape than they are in now, you and I will have a little chat."

Rook nodded slightly as she got up, she even had the ball bearings to wave at him as she closed his door behind her. "Then if we are done exchanging pleasantries, I have a trip to pack for."

The SPARTAN saboteur smirked to herself as she made her way into the more used part of the Enforcers' Station. That had been a bit of a blast from the past for her. It had been longer than she cared to remember since she had last been summoned somewhere to be interrogated for answers.

Her smirk widened into a full blown grin as she caught sight of both Smokescreen and Blaster waiting for her a good distance from their superior's office. "You two missed me that much, huh?"

Smokescreen gave her a once over, then turned to his partner. "You owe me five credits. She's still in one piece."

"Blaster! How could you!" Rook gasped theatrically, holding one hand to her spark chamber as if shot though. "Betting against me? You should know better by now!"

The communications expert gave her a dirty look as he handed over the credit chits to the diversionary tactician. "Our Chief never saw you coming and I bet against you before I knew you, femme."

"Well, you don't know me. Yet, anyways." The SPARTAN saboteur smirked at them both. "Now then, are you two almost ready? What about Blue?"

"Bluestreak will meet us at the city's gates when we leave." The Praxian Enforcer tilted his helm at the gray femme. "You haven't told us where we are going yet either, Rook."

She waved a hand at them dismissively before starting to shoo them out of the Station. "Details. Are your cassettes coming, Blast'?"

"Yes," Blaster gave her a sideways look for that comment, even as he allowed her to chivvy him out of the building, "they go everywhere with me. Their _cassettes_ , Rook."

"It's not like I've ever seen cassettes before. I don't quite know how that works out."

\V/

" _So_ … how _is_ this going to work?" Markmaker had leaned his frame against the _ATHENS_ ' bridge's walls, arms crossed over his chest plates and a frown on his faceplate. "You got both the _ATHENS_ and your… I suppose we could call them guests, but they're more like superiors. And damn if that isn't confusing."

The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots rubbed the underside of his jaw hinge as the SPARTANs' trine leader looked back just to glare at him.

Drax and Markmaker were technically in one of the hangers in the Aero Space Division. The seeker council had insisted that the ship be housed with them instead of leaving it out like the trine had originally.

When they had seen the state of the _ATHENS_ , they had also volunteered to fix the gash in the side plating of the Prowler class ship. They did so simply to keep an optic on the trine when none of them had the time to keep the unbalanced trine company.

After Drax had given all of them the slip to report to Markmaker while the other SPARTANs went off to collect the ship, the seeker council wasn't going to take a chance in letting all of the trine out of their range of influence without some serious convincing.

"They aren't our superiors, yet." Drawing the tanks attention back to him, the dark painted seeker glowered at the uninvited guest. "And they won't be, unless they decide that I would make an acceptable Air Commander, which has a spark's chance in the Pit of happening."

A rev of the seeker's turbine, and Drax returned his attention back to the console he had been working on. Updating the ship for Cybertronian controls was little more than a chore that the trine used to waste time.

"Spot's going to handle the ship. He wanted to know if you want a lift to Central."

The tank smirked at the seeker's back. "That's a rhetorical question, right? Either go my own slow way, tank treads are not fast in the least, or get a lift by an interstellar… excuse me, _intergalactic_ ship and be there the same cycle we leave? I wonder what-"

"Mute it and go away." Drax snapped back, not even looking at Markmaker.

\V/

Refit was excited enough to be bouncing off the walls of the living unit she and Holdout had been living in for nearly a vorn.

Sandstorm and Impactor, who had leave approved by the Autobots' Prime himself and had visited in order to find out why they had leave in the first place, watched on with amusement in the doorway as the soon to be medic graduate flitted from place to place with a very exasperated tracker trying to finish up buffing her paint.

"I swear to the Pit, 'fit, you don't hold still and I will use your new medic's tools to weld you in one spot!" Startled by the rough annoyance in her 'sister's' vocalizer, Refit paused in changing directions, which was long enough to have a femme that easily weighed half again her weight knock her over and pin her to the floor. The medic was on her front while Holdout sat on her hip joints and flashed the two mechs that had recently arrived a quick grin. "Be right with you, give me a moment."

Sandstorm shrugged and entered the flat, evading the portion of the room that had two femmes wrestling over the buffing cloth to see if Holdout had any high-grade in her room, well used to the antics that the two could get up to when one was hyper. Feeling a bit odd in the living flat of his soldier's femme friend, Impactor hesitated in the doorway until it beeped at him, a reminder to get out of the way so the door could close.

By the time the Wrecker came out of his courted's berth room with two cubes of high grade, Holdout had finished Refit's buffing and was helping the other femme to her pedes.

The tracker gave the cubes an arched optic ridge, but didn't say anything about them as Sandstorm passed one to his superior. "So, questions?"

"A few." The Wrecker Commander agreed. "You know the Prime?"

"It's more like he knows us." Refit, having divested herself of most her pent up energy, smiled widely at the two Autobots standing in the living room of the flat. "He asked a few questions, and our commander talked to him."

Impactor looked at her just a bit oddly for that, but Holdout finally realized the time and all but shoved the mechs and the medic out of the flat. "We need to leave now if you're to get there in time, 'fit! Gossip later."

The Wreckers let themselves be maneuvered out of the living unit, but Refit dug her heel stabilizers into the ground. "Wait! How many?"

"Eleven at the last count, not counting me. There might be more there, a few don't know if they'll make it in time. Those two new mechs will be there as well, and that's not counting the non-SPARTANs coming with. Now move IT!"

\V/

Warcry gently shoved his way through the crowd of bots, five other mechs following in his wake. He had to move slowly as his great weight could topple unwary bots if they ran into him.

Galeforce was right behind his CO, while Silentforce took up the rear. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had the happy task of keeping Ratchet from blowing a gasket over the press of Cybertronians on all sides.

"Damn, I recall graduating from the Youth Center's educational facility, but it was nothing like this." The silver twin looked around at the sheer turn out for the graduating class of medics.

"Medical Repair is a fragging _respectable_ profession." The yellow medic right behind him growled out. "Most of these slaggers are administrators in hospital stations looking for more personnel as well as some family units here to see how their relations have done. How much longer are we going to be out here?"

: _Not long, Ratchet. I think our CO finally found where we are supposed to be._ : Even as Silentforce transmitted that thought, the tank's path changed abruptly to their left.

Rook waved them over, two Enforcer mechs and another Praxian mech behind her. She was sitting in a closed off wing of the auditorium, one that stated it was reserved for family units of the graduates. "Trick' already took care of the instructor's concern over the number of us showing up for 'fit, sir."

"And he is?"

"Behind you, sir."

Trickflip smirked at the disgusted look that earned him from the tank, who blinked and then started to laugh at the youngling on the infiltrator's shoulder joints. "Well, hello little femme."

Silverbell grinned down at the massive mech, delighted that she was taller than him on Trick's shoulders. She wasn't too sure why she was happy, but she was. "Hello, sir! My name's Silverbell, but you can call me Hell's Bells!"

Warcry's optic ridges rose sharply at that, while both Galeforce and Silentforce twisted around to look at her, then at Trickflip. Rook burst out laughing at her bold statement. The infiltrator sighed as he swung the youngling down off his shoulder joints and guided her up into an unclaimed seat. "I knew that was going to come back and bite me in the-"

"LANGUAGE!" Shadowdancer, balancing a sparkling on her hip joint, appeared out of the masses and smacked her subordinate in the back of his helm. "There are underdeveloped audio receptors around, Trick'!"

Kynaite clicked smugly, safely tucked at his adoptive carrier's side, as Silverbell snickered. Rook's laughter doubled as Flashfire and Ruby finally made their way to where Trickflip had pointed them in, giving a wary look at the other bots that had the same symbol painted on their left arms as the femme and mech they had been living with.

Ratchet gave the femme a glare from his position behind the twins. "I thought you said-"

"In Gygax and for Kynaite, I don't care. Still don't." The SPARTAN-Bots' XO nodded at the medic and handed over her sparkling so she could get over the railing. "But this isn't Gygax, and there are more younglings than Kynaite around."

Sort of familiar with the mech now holding him, the blue and silver sparking consented to the handling only long enough for his carrier to take a seat next to Aunt 'Ro', and clambered off the medic and across two mechs to reach her lap, chattering in annoyance the whole time.

Smokescreen had stiffened when the other Praxian's sparkling had used his frame like a jungle gym to reach his carrier. "Err… Rook, who-"

"Later. When it's not so hard to be overheard." The gray femme smiled back at them. "Introductions will be held after the graduation. Maybe not until we relocate to Iacon. Just sit tight, and stick to the SPARTAN you know."

The diversionary Enforcer looked over to the unknown Praxian as she waved over another femme, this one with a helicopter alt mode. "Over here, Zephyr!"

The ex-Enforcer nodded respectfully to the two still active Enforcers behind her employer as she got in range to see their decals. "I saw a few seekers here."

"We're expecting a number of them, was there another tank mech too?" Shadowdancer adjusted her hold on Kynaite as the sparkling decided whatever was going on wasn't for him and pried her left forearm plate off and started to take the tools concealed there out so he could safely mess with his carrier's systems.

Rook peered over the tactician's door-wings and spoke up before Zephyr could reply.

"You told me he did that, but I didn't think he actually did it when there are so many bots around." The gray femme quickly retrieved her superior's electric blue armor plate before it could get lost on the floor.

"He'll do that in the middle of a bar, so I don't think this would bother him." The helicopter clambered over the railing as she nodded to the saboteur as she took back the armor plate. She had seen her on occasions when the gray femme would call for Shadowdancer and she answered her employer's comms.

Further talk was interrupted by the arrival of Drax and his trine, with nearly the entire seeker council and Markmaker following him. Spotter didn't even wait to be greeted by the CO and vaulted over the railing, followed closely by a jade green seeker. Nodding respectfully to the officers, Tigerstripe helped a tri colored seeker femme over next before vaulting over himself. Drax and Markmaker waited patiently as a white seeker mech and gold and green seeker mech preceded them.

Rook arched her optic ridges at the number of seekers now sitting behind her. "Are you sure there wasn't one or two more that you wanted to take with you, Drax?"

Markmaker snickered as the trine leader glared at his fellow Covert Ops. "There's one seeker that's too big to duck in here, she's still with the _ATHENS_. Does that answer your question?"

The SPARTANs' saboteur nodded mockingly. "Besides her, I mean."

"Enough." Shadowdancer turned her attention to her subordinates. "You two start bickering, and I will send you outside. This is for Refit, not your amusement."

To Smokescreen's, Bluestreak's, and Blaster's surprise, Rook just nodded and sat back in her chair. The dark blue and black seeker gave a low turbine rev before hoisting himself over the railing.

Five breems before the graduation ceremony was to start, Holdout and Knightblade made their appearance with their own tagalongs. Since the volume in the auditorium had done nothing but rise since the group had been sitting there, the two SPARTAN femmes settled for simply saluting their officers and taking their places.

Sandstorm and Impactor were a bit nonplussed over the number of bots sitting in the wing reserved for the little medic femme as they followed the tracker, Wheeljack simply vaulted over to sit next to Ratchet, and Perceptor gave the number of bots that he had never met but knew the general layout of their systems a long look before taking a seat next to his assistant.

By the time Titan had gotten in, beating the last breem's countdown for his place in the family unit wing, the volume in the auditorium had risen high enough that the instructors had to use a klaxon to quiet down the audience.

(ooo000ooo)

Refit barreled ecstatically into the loose group of SPARTANs and their guests. "I got first in my class!"

Knightblade shared a clueless look with Rook, but Wheeljack and Ratchet made enough fuss over her accomplishment that the former AI didn't notice the lag before the other SPARTANs chimed in with their own two bits, the hasty explanation Perceptor shared with the sniper was rephrased over the tactical uplink to clued them in on the importance of being first in one's class.

Shadowdancer shifted her hold on Kynaite, who was not happy that he had to interrupt his work for something as ignorable as a nap. "What else were you expecting, 'fit? We're SPARTANs."

The ex-AI giggled at that, letting go of the tracker to give the tactician and her sparkling a hug. "Silly, I know. So?"

Kynaite twittered at her, impressed with whatever she had done to earn a hug, and snuggled into her side, making the ex-AI giggle.

"Now, or later? I'm processing later, 'fit. Let's do this only once, because repeating myself isn't my favorite pastime, and we are missing SPARTANs for a complete introduction." Shadowdancer returned the hug before stepping back so the new medic could greet another of her siblings. She retreated farther after a minuet, and repeated the same statement to the SPARTANs' CO.

Warcry gave a hum of his engine. "I can see the logic in that. How do you want to handle transport?"

"I don't. Logistics in transportation were never my strong point." The Praxian femme looked over the large group of miss mashed bots then back to the tank. "How about we just announce to move this slag to Iacon? Speaking of which, does Iacon have the space for all this?"

"Sure and yeah." Warcry grinned unrepentantly at the irritated look that earned him from his 3IC. "Have a little faith in your commanding officer, Shadow'. I know what to do in Logistics."

Shadowdancer snorted with a dismissive flick of her door-wings. "At least one of us does."

The two watched as Refit made her way through the SPARTANs, hugging one or two here and there and greeting the non-SPARTANs that congratulated her on her hard work. Once she got to the end of the line of SPARTANs. Warcry raised the volume of his vocalizer to be heard over the general noise.

"Alright, bots! Those of you with young attached, that includes you Shadow', meet up with the trine at the _ATHENS_. The rest of you, we're for Iacon for the second part of the festivities!" He grinned at the dirty look the tactician threw him before stalking off to join the femmes that had stuck close to Trickflip for most of the cycle.

As the group broke up into smaller increments, some heading off to refuel before the second part of their trips and some heading for the highway, the tank counted off how many were here and how many were supposed to be in Iacon's Autobot base by now.

Shaking his helm, he gave a look to the newly minted medic that was waiting politely for him to notice her. "Is there a problem, 'fit?"

The ex-AI fidgeted before shrugging. "Not really, I was wondering if I could bring some bot with."

She clasped her hands behind her back, a weak smile on her faceplate.

"With? Of course, you're a SPARTAN too, 'fit." The tank gave her a grin, wisely deactivating his audio receptors before she trilled. "Grab your bot and let's go."

Refit dashed back into the auditorium and returned less than a breem later, trailing a bright blue mech behind her. The ex-AI stopped in front of her CO and pushed the mech forward a bit. "This is Jolt. I would like permission to bring him with."

Jolt gave the six mechs in front of him a weak grin as he waved a hand. "Err… hi? Don't hurt me…?"

Wheeljack, who had abandoned the SPARTANs' sniper to travel with his best friend, snickered at the looks the other SPARTANs gave the unrepentant bodyguard specialist.

"They won't hurt you, Jolt. I should know, because I spent the first megacycle of our acquaintance annoying the slag out of them." The inventor extended a hand with a happy flash of blue light. "My name's Wheeljack or 'jack if you want.

Hand half way extended, the blue mech froze as the identity of the other bots made themselves known to his processors and badly lagging CPU. " _Primus_. I knew 'fit knew the Wreckers, but I didn't know she knew you two!"

He shook the inventor's hand enthusiastically.

Ratchet rolled his optics as his best friend brightened considerably. "Let's just slagging go! Please!"

Warcry chuckled as the older medic hurried his friend, more like harassed, on. He motioned for the two new medics to follow the older mechs before following behind.


	15. Chapter 15

Nitro and Axel were waiting with Clearsight and Quickgrip for the _ATHENS_ to land in the docking hanger of Iacon's Autobot base.

The scout hadn't said more than three words to the bounty hunter since he and his Praxian escort arrived, with the close-quarters weapon specialist coming in a close second with a total of five words spoken at all. Uneasily looking around, the non-SPARTAN mech was more than a little disturbed by the calm acceptance the population of the base had for the three self-admitted war built bots.

Nitro suddenly fluttered his door-wings in a Praxian greeting, drawing Axel's attention back to the situation at hand. A striking electric blue and black Praxian femme had disembarked the odd looking transport, balancing a sparkling on one hip joint, followed closely by another pair of femmes and a youngling.

As the Praxian femme got closer, the bounty hunter was able to note the wicked claws that assisted the sparkling's balance.

"Nitro, Clearsight, Quickgrip, once every bot is here, we'll start the overall summery. You have that long to sort yourselves, and you guest," she nodded to the Praxian mech, "out before we get to anything we need you present for."

Her gold optics flicked over to him, making his spinal struts stiffen in surprise.

"Axel, I do have to ask if you have some sort of thrill seeking tendencies. One would think that with everything you know of us already, you would have chosen not to come and avoid any more… _unpleasantness_." The two adult framed femmes behind her exchanged looks at the other femme's words.

"I have some questions that I want answered first, femme." This could only be Shadowdancer, one of the two that had gone through his processors. She seemed relatively calm, surely not anywhere as violent as the demolitions specialist had described her as. Axel tilted his helm to the side and crossed his arms over his chest plates as the three he was standing with each gave him an odd look. "Answer my questions, and I'll go away."

"Where would the fun be in that?" The SPARTAN-Bots' XO purred at him with a smirk. "I have some duties to attend to, so I'll leave you three to get as… _comfortable_ , as you can get. Clearsight, can you escort Flashfire, Ruby, and their youngling Silverbell to the base's rec room? I'll send Trickflip to you as soon as he arrives."

She hoisted Kynaite higher in her arms before taking off without waiting for an answer from the scout.

Silverbell looked up at the red and black femme, who wasn't as shiny as Trick's brother 'force, with a certain amount of young awe. She had the same marks as the others that Rook and Trick' claimed as family, which made her just as good as Trick' was in her still developing CPU.

Clearsight looked back at her with a decent amount of unease. The scout had never had to deal with the young of any race before, not even humans way back when. She looked up to the two adult frame femmes sheepishly. "I'm not all too good with… uh-"

"Follow her, and try to keep any questions to the type that can be answered with a yes or no." Nitro slapped the shy SPARTAN femme on the back as his other hand motioned for one mildly disturbed Axel to follow him, taking a moment to snatch up a crate he had retrieved from the base's Supply Office earlier before heading for the _ATHENS_ ' open cargo ramp.

Quickgrip headed off after them before the SPARTAN femme could consider asking him for help, passing a number of seekers that had landed since they had been talking.

(ooo000ooo)

Shadowdancer found the office of the SPARTAN-Bots' Commander with little problem. The Autobots' even had a sign on the wall for the tank's office, that made the Praxian smirk as she walked on past.

Hacking into his door control one handed and searching through his desk and filing system for any and all references to the current situation was barely more than sparkling play for a Covert Ops agent such as herself. Her ultimate goal, a data pad that contained the allotment of rooms available for the guests the other SPARTANs were bringing with, was in her clawed hand before it registered that she was about to get some company.

Prowl, alerted to the other tactician's actions only because he had been coming back from a brief break with Jazz, rounded the corner and frowned minutely at the open door of an office he knew for a fact no other bot other than Warcry and Kup had the codes for. Without breaking his even stride, the black and white Praxian made his way to the open office door.

Kynaite, who had been set in the tank's large chair as his adoptive carrier searched the strange looking room, wiggled his way down to the floor and landed with a soft thump, which was enough to alert both Praxians that he was on the move.

Shadowdancer clicked her glossa as she made to pick him up, freezing in place momentarily when Prowl finally got into a position to see inside the office. She swung the sparkling back up to her hip joint and subspaced the data pad before she smirked at the other Praxian. "Excuse us, Prowl. But there are a number of bots that need my attention closing in on the main gates of the city."

"I see. One question, before you go." The ex-Enforcer was hard pressed to not smile at the sparkling trying to look innocent in the SPARTAN-Bots' XO hands. "Do you have the codes for this office, Shadowdancer?"

"Nope… so can you lock it for me?" She flashed him a smile as she whisked herself and her sparkling out the door and passed Prowl. Before the two left the other Praxian's audio range, the SPARTAN-Bot tactician called out over her door-wings, "Your brothers will be here soon!"

When they were safely down a few corridors, Shadowdancer gave Kynaite a confused look. "That was clumsy. Didn't I teach you better than that?"

He clicked and whirled a little growl with some exasperation at her. There was no other way down, he _had_ looked.

The XO hummed to herself as she considered that. "Remind me to teach you how to fall properly, then."

(ooo000ooo)

Given the disparity of speeds each bot that had driven to Iacon was capable of, the next few joors saw Shadowdancer holding a post nearby the main gates of the Autobot base. Kynaite was amusing himself with what he could find in her left shin, the highest part of his adoptive carrier that he could reach by standing on her pedes, when the first of the bots arrived.

Knightblade hesitated once she transformed into her bipedal form, then scooped the sparkling up. "Isn't that a little dangerous, scraplet?"

Chittering with annoyance, the sparkling twisted around in the sniper's hands. He wasn't done with that last part yet.

Shadowdancer glanced up from the datapad she had taken out of the CO's office and smirked at the very irritated Kynaite in the other femme's grip.

"He'll do it to you too, if you don't set him down soon." She traded the pad for the sparkling before taking one good look at the scientist with the sniper. "So… Perceptor. Anything in particular you wanted to learn while you're with us?"

"I am present more for my personal curiosity than any nefarious purpose you may have devised for me."

She hesitated as she rephrased that in her own processor, a trick the other femme had passed on to translate the mech's convoluted speech. "I'm not saying you don't have a reason, I just wanted to know what it is you're expecting so I can get a jump on answering any potential questions."

The XO set her sparkling down again, letting him go back to messing with her shin.

As she straightened, the sniper handed back the data pad to her. "I know where you're going to stay while you're here, Percy. Ma'am, what time is the meeting?"

"Don't know yet. Orpheus still hasn't given me an estimated time for arrival yet. I think he's who we are all waiting on." Shadowdancer shrugged as she went back to paging through the pad to see where the sniper had slotted her guest. "I'll let you know when he gets back to me, but for the meantime, remain close to the _ATHENS_ , please."

Knightblade nodded before saluting and leading the scientist off to see who else was already present.

The next group saw Zephyr following Rook and Trickflip, along with the two Praxus stationed Enforcers and the other Praxian mech. Rook, once back on her pedes, proceeded to collapse in the Praxian femme's arms and pretended to do what the others could only describe as whine a useless complaint. "Shadow'! He's being mean to me! Make him stop."

Smokescreen, who had been only moments behind the saboteur in his own transformation, glared at the back of the gray femme.

"I am not, your just being ridiculous!" He frowned when Rook's positioning made itself at home in his memory banks, causing him to wonder the relation between the two as he looked between them.

"One would think a little time on your own would mature you, not regress you to the behavior pattern of a youngling, Rook." Shadowdancer promptly dropped her subordinate on her skid plating before looking over her helm to Trickflip. "I don't know when we'll get to the meeting, I'll let you know when Orpheus gets in. Your femmes are in the rec room closest to the hanger with Clearsight."

She paused, looking over the four small bots the red, yellow, and silver mech had released.

"What in the Pit are those?"

Kynaite looked over to what had surprised his carrier and decided he didn't like them. The sparkling hid behind the armor-less left shin he had been working on, peering out behind her only occasionally.

Rook snorted at the sparkling's actions and hoisted herself upright. "They're cassettes. I've never quite got _what_ they are, though. The whole thing confuses me, so I never asked in case it would've been rude."

Blaster sighed, not really surprised since cassette technology was rather uncommon outside of the military and Enforcer ranks. "They're symbiotic Cybertronians. They don't really have the size or energy capacity to do much on their own, so they have another Cybertronian, me in this case, to assist and get help if needed. Useful little bots to have around, they help me with my communications work when not resting in cassette form."

"So… intelligent?" Shadowdancer blinked down at the four, looking over the unusual looking mini-bots.

"Sure as sure, femme." The light blue and silver cassettes smirked at her. "Name's Eject. He's Rewind," he pointed to the black and white cassette behind him, "and those two are Ramhorn," a red and yellow cassette snorted at her, "and Steeljaw."

'Steeljaw' happened to be the gold painted cassette currently sniffing her pedes. "You have been to Gygax recently, mostly in a bar, judging by the oil grade you smell of and the slight acidic wear on your paint. Why?"

"It's where I live." The Praxian fluttered her door-wings in a greeting before looking back at her sparkling. "Are you sure you don't want to come out?"

A burst of negative clicks and stubborn twitters answered her.

"Very well." Shadowdancer looked back to the five in front of her and handed her purloined data pad over to the infiltrator. "Smokescreen, Bluestreak, Prowl is on his way."

Trickflip read the pad as he slung an arm over the slighter Enforcer. "Do the cassettes need additional room, or can they bunk with you?"

"They bunk with me anyways, even if you give them rooms." The communications expert replied, looking between the Praxians of the group. "Who's Prowl?"

Shadowdancer arched an optic ridge before looking to Rook, who shrugged and jerked her helm to indicate the two Praxian mechs with her, using the old SPARTAN sign language to inform her that the mechs didn't want the fact that they were brothers to become common knowledge for some unknown reason. The XO looked to them, who gave her some sheepish flutters of their door-wings at her frown.

Prowl fortunately chose that moment to make his presence known with an ever curious Jazz trailing not far from him. "My designation is Prowl. I take it you are Blaster, Smokescreen's partner in the Enforcers."

The mech and his cassettes looked from one brother to the other as Jazz, unfortunately, chose that moment to make a comment of his own. "Ah didn't know ya had brothers, Prowlie. Ah da thought ya were one 'o 'em pre-programmed bots. Ya act like one."

Rook bit her right hand's plating, trying not to burst out in giggles, as Trickflip watched on in interest. Heaving a sigh, Shadowdancer reached over and gripped the silver mech carefully by one of his sensitive audio horns and pulled him to her. "That was not to be common knowledge, Jazz. They were trying to keep that to themselves for whatever reason, and you should have respected that."

"Not like ah intentionally spilled da bolts, femme." Totally unconcerned that one of the war built SPARTANs had him by such a sensitive protrusion, the silver mech raised an optic ridge of his own over his visor at the black and white Praxian. "Some bot's gotta tell meh it's ah secret 'fore ah can keep 'em."

"I suppose I can see the logic in that." Prowl allowed, giving the Praxian femme an accepting twitch of his door-wings. Shadowdancer's lip plates twisted in a frown, but released the saboteur anyways. "However, we would prefer if you forgot you ever knew."

Jazz simply nodded with a grin, but Blaster shook his helm. "I, for one, would really like to know why neither Smokey nor Blue ever told me they had another brother before I forget anything."

"Elsewhere, please. Unless you _want_ it to become common knowledge." The SPARTAN-Bots' XO gestured to the road where another white and black mech, Titan, was visible at the head of another group in the distance.

"Very well." Prowl nodded to her and gestured the group to follow him. "It started when I was student of the Cyber-Ninja Corps, and the deactivation of Master Yoketron by one of his other students."

His vocalizer faded as he left the Praxian femme and her sparkling at the gates, but Shadowdancer could still hear Jazz's rather loud exclamation about some point of the other tactician's story when they finally left her decipherable range.

Shaking her helm as Kynaite ensured the coast was clear before continuing whatever he had been doing, the XO watched as the Tyger Pax Enforcer slowed down to stop near her, followed closely by Ratchet, Wheeljack, Refit, Jolt, and Galeforce.

As they transformed and switched their discussion from being transmitted over the public comm channels to a verbal method of communication, Shadowdancer began to see why the others had let them get ahead of them with only two SPARTANs as escort.

The medics and the inventor were in the middle of a conversation about the SPARTANs' axillary systems, and how they could be adapted to work on normal Cybertronians. However, since Jolt didn't know the truth behind three of his traveling companions the discussion was being treated as theoretical for his sake.

Kynaite perked up at the mention of one of his favorite subjects, one that his carrier admittedly didn't know much about, and abandoned his work on her to make his unsteady way to aunty 'fit so he could hear more. Shadowdancer's lip plates twitched as she looked down into the mess her sparkling had made of her left shin assembly.

"I'm just saying, that it might not be a bad idea to take up to the scientific council later. Carbide ceramics are tougher than just Cybertonium alloy, and the dependence on such a limited and degradable resource isn't really processing in the long term." Refit paused only long enough to pick up her nephew before continuing. "I know of some bots who have that instead of the rare metal making up their support struts, and it is some fascinating stuff which is able to stand up to the sheer abuse they put it to."

"But you can't fragging _weld_ ceramics, 'fit. Repairing it would require medics like us to replace the entire slagging strut in the case of cracks or breaks." Ratchet countered, looking for the world like the devil's advocate he was playing.

Wheeljack was hard pressed to keep his vocalizer fins displaying an emotion other than amusement as Jolt processed that thought and tried to answer the older medic's concern.

"How hard would that be? It's not like there are many things that can stress or fracture Cybertonium alloy to begin with, so repair isn't a normal concern, and this carbide ceramic doesn't sound like it would break easily. Would simply replacing the damaged struts cut repair times? For that matter, is simply welding the breaks and cracks in Cybertonium really the best answer, or does welding it weaken the alloy?"

Shadowdancer cleared her vocalizer to remind the non-SPARTANs that there were others nearby. Galeforce simply looked amused at the content of the discussion even as Titan smoothed his rather aggravated looking faceplate into non-expression. The Enforcer had spent the last two joors listening to them pick apart the SPARTANs' systems, and had difficulties following along with the medical jargon laced conversation.

"Ratch', 'jack, I really hope I don't have to tell you where to go. Refit," she handed the new medic the data pad, "find your friend a room. Ti', Gale', I don't know when the meeting will be held, so keep close to the _ATHENS_ ; you too, 'fit _._ "

Refit balanced Kynaite in one arm as she read what was available as the two SPARTAN mechs saluted and walked past the Praxian femme. Jolt looked from his friend to the femme he hadn't seen before.

The sparkling pouted at his carrier, upset she had interrupted something that sounded interesting. Shadowdancer just raised an optic ridge at him, before she pointedly looked down to her half disassembled shin and back to him before looking to the two new medics.

Setting the sparkling back down when he wiggled in her arms, the former AI handed the pad back and crooked a finger joint at the blue mech. "I know where you're going to be for the next few cycles. Wheeljack, Ratchet, we'll see you later."

With that Refit led the slightly confused Jolt off into the base.

The Head Medic of Iacon hummed noncommittally at her while watching the sparkling return to his abandoned work in the blue and black Praxian's shin. " _That_ is slagging weird."

"What is?" Shadowdancer followed to where the medic was looking, noting that Kynaite had decided to simply replace everything that he had messed with instead of risking another interruption.

Ratchet opened his mouth components to say something before another thought occurred to him and he shut his mouth again, giving the femme a long look before speaking up. "He's due for his first fragging upgrade soon, right? Mind letting me and 'jack at him while your here?"

The femme blinked at him, well aware that he had sidestepped whatever he was bothered by, but twitched an affirmative with her door-wings to Wheeljack's excited wheedling to be allowed to upgrade her sparking to his first youngling frame. "Well… I was going to ask you to do so later."

Kynaite looked up from reassembling the tools back in the shin plate, looking from the two mechs to his carrier with an arched optic ridge.

"Wow, not even your original creation and already he's starting to pick up your mannerisms." The inventor gave the sparkling a happy flash of blue light. "We can start next cycle. Upgrades usually take a few good joors of work, so whenever you're free we can start."

Shadowdancer considered that as she watched Kynaite reattached her armor plate. "Early then. Mid cycle War' plans on starting the brief that the bots that asked are here for."

When Wheeljack froze and looked at her with yellow light spilling from his vocalizer fins, she huffed in exasperated amusement and looked up at him.

"No, neither of you _have_ to be there, 'jack. You can sit this one out."

The inventor grimaced at her as the yellow faded to a purplish orange. "Why your own history doesn't give you all a major case of the horrors, I'll never know. It's scary enough for me."

"We have accepted it, more or less, as something that is… was necessary." The XO flicked her claws at the two before picking up her sparkling. "Besides, why would we see it as horrible when it's the only kind of function we've ever known?"

"Well… that's a depressing thought." Looking from the sparkling to the carrier, Wheeljack had to ask. "Are you doing the same thing for Kynaite?"

He flinched back from the rather violent twitch of the femme's door-wings, giving her an apologetic flash of purple light at her glare.

"I am aware that the method of our training was in violation of many basic rights, 'jack." Her gold optics narrowed on the inventor, more than a little insulted. "I have no intention to _train_ Kynaite in the same manner we were."

Before his best friend could torque off the mechacidal femme anymore, Ratchet pressed his hands against the other mech's back and pushed Wheeljack past the Praxian. "Smooth, you fragger. Why not ask to have your slagging helm removed violently and crammed somewhere uncomfortable while you're at it? You and I both know that her Primus blessed _carrier's programming_ wouldn't let her do something like that slag to what is essentially her creation."

Shadowdancer twitched her door-wings violently one last time as the two got out of her audio range, before putting the end of that conversation behind her.

Nearly an entire joor later, the last group of bots she was waiting for came into her view. Seeing as Warcry and Markmaker were with them, the others in the convoy were traveling at a slower speed to pace the pair of tanks.

It was her first opportunity to see the two new mechs, the metallic twins, for any more than a mere breem or two. She looked them over, the two seemed to be in the middle of a race, before looking for the SPARTAN that should have joined up while the convoy had been moving.

She picked out the dark green and black colors of the assassin, and huffed to herself, a bit more than annoyed. The least that Orpheus could have done was inform her that he had made contact with the CO. For that matter, why didn't either of the tanks inform her that the last SPARTAN had arrived?

Kynaite, sitting on her pede, looked up at his less than pleased carrier while wondering what was bothering her.

The silver twin gunned his engine, attempting to pull ahead of his gold brother. Shadowdancer's battle computer tracked the both of them and calculated the likely outcome of their race.

Pressing her lip plates together at the probable outcome, the Praxian femme snatched up her sparkling and jumped just in time to clear both as they sped under her to the chorus of squealing breaks. With a now disorientated and distinctly unhappy sparkling the XO turned around, walked over to the two stalled alt modes, and planted her pedes in the hoods of both mechs as balancing on the similar surfaces without much trouble. "What the _frag_ do you two think you're doing?"

Sideswipe's first impulse was to apologize, seeing as the two had nearly hit her and the bitlit.

His brother was of another frame of processor.

Sunstreaker revved irritably at the femme _standing_ on his paint job, triggering his transformation sequence before his silver twin even knew what he was about. He got up on his pedes to start ripping into the Praxian femme, sparkling in tow or not he was not going to let her mar his paint… and that was as far as he got.

Shadowdancer had slid off the mech as his hood pulled back in his transformation, keeping her balance by shifting her weight to the silver one before jumping off him. She then set the sparkling down to stagger around, spun back to the gold mech and pinned him to the wall the two had nearly ran into by ramming her right pede into his throat supports before he managed to straighten himself out. Off balance, half slumped against the wall, and unable to support himself without grabbing onto the electric blue and black pede pinning him; Sunstreaker scrabbled at the leg plate while glaring at her.

The Praxian smirked at the both of them, Sideswipe had returned to bipedal mode only astroseconds after his brother, as her gold optics started to bleed red. "I am Shadowdancer, Third in Command and Tactical Lieutenant of the SPARTAN-Bots. Is there anything you two have to say that might constitute as any last words before I tear _bits_ off the both of you?"

"You need a vacation?"

The deep vocalizer pulled all four bots' attention to the gates, Kynaite had given up trying to make the world stop spinning and had sat himself down next to his carrier's left pede, the one he had been working on until just recently. Warcry picked up the data pad that Shadowdancer had dropped in favor of saving her sparkling.

"And, you need to stop hacking into things, like my office. One of these orns you're going to find something you really won't like." After a moment, he realized that the tactician hadn't moved and pinned her with a glare of his own. "Let up on the poor mech, Shadow'. We never told either of them about you or your little… _quirks_."

"And this is my fault how?" She shifted her slight weight off the gold mech nonetheless, letting Sunstreaker slide to the ground with a wince inducing screech of metal on stone. "That type of neglect would be your own problem, sir."

Sunstreaker bolted to his pedes, intent on doing the femme some damage before she could react, only to get the strangest, twin-bladed, energy sword he had ever seen nearly jabbed into his optics.

" _You_ ," the femme hissed at him, "you will behave yourself, or I'll _teach_ you something."

Markmaker, only a few steps behind the other tank, spoke up next, drawing the Praxian's attention away from the twins and to the other two SPARTANs standing in the gateway. "About that vacation, Shadow'."

"Oh, don't even start. Before I could even take one, you three need to be reminded of the proper-"

Silentforce took both brothers by the elbow joints and led them away fast. _:Next time you do something so stupid, we're going to let her at you. As for right now, try not to get in her way until she decides there are better things to do than beat the both of you senseless.:_

Sunstreaker ripped himself out of the mech's hold, twisting around to see the damage to his paint job. "Femme was lucky, that's all."

Sideswipe slapped his hand over his optics as the bodyguard expert looked at him like he had lost his helm. _:She left out the whole Head of the Covert Ops team out of her title when she introduced herself to you. Do you know what that means?:_

"That…" The gold mech trailed off as the implications of that reached his CPU.

 _:That she doesn't need an excuse, a quick deactivation is one of her_ specialties _.:_ Silentforce tried leading the two on again, only this time it worked. _:Assassinations are not uncommon for the Covert Ops, that's why I declined when she offered_ me _a slot in that division. They all live half in and half out of their own shadowy, backstabbing, world, and a few of them tend to become paranoid to the Pits. But they also specialize in everything else that could be remotely utilized in warfare, including and not limited to sabotage and infiltration in addition to psychological warfare and assassinations. As the tactician of the Covert Ops, she knows every trick in the book file for every type of special operations.:_

Sideswipe spent a moment to wonder about the occupations of the bots he had met in the unit so far. "So, she, that gray femme, the two green and black mechs, but not Warcry, make up the Covert Ops, right?"

_:And Drax.:_

"And… wait, _what_?" The silver swordmech looked at the red and black mech steering them down the halls. "Who the frag is Drax?"

Silentforce huffed air out of his vents in exasperation. _:He's a seeker framed mech. Covert Ops assault specialist and the leader of our trine.:_

Stopping halfway between the docking hanger and the barracks, the defensive specialist released the both of them and pinned them with a stern look of his own.

_:I have a meeting to go to in a few breems, you two either get some recharge or stick to a rec room. I'm not too sure what's going to happen in the next few joors, or even the next few cycles, so keep an optic and a receptor tuned for any summons. Unless another SPARTAN tells you otherwise, we all are to meet up in the usual training room at mid orn next cycle.:_

(ooo000ooo)

Warcry eventually moved the argument, which was more like the XO tearing long strips of alloys off all three of them, into the _ATHENS_ for the sake of expediency. Shadowdancer barely kept herself from yelling the entire walk from the entrance of the base to the ships' hanger near the back.

She was still sulking about the assassin's idea of refraining from bothering her, the thought that Kynaite could be enough of a distraction for her nearly laughable. She did finish ripping into them once the cargo ramp closed behind them, the heavy shielding of the ship keeping any other audio receptors from picking up her discontent with the others.

After she was done, the four SPARTANs split up to take care of their last breem errands before their meeting in the _ATHENS'_ rec room, Orpheus and Markmaker heading off to their rooms as Shadowdancer deviated to the base's nearby rec room to leave Kynaite with Zephyr and Warcry headed off to inform Optimus Prime that all of the SPARTANs had made it back to Iacon.

Before the breem was even half over, most of the SPARTANs had collected in their rec room, picking out their seating with little problem. Nitro had some difficulty with the crate he had sent on to Iacon by the supply lines Holdout had established and which he had picked up before the _ATHENS_ had returned, one that made some unusual sounds as the contents rolled around when handled. Refit and Shadowdancer were the last two in, the ex-AI having come straight from the med bay and the Praxian femme from handing off her sparkling.

Seeing as the layout of the rec room itself prevented the usual regimented meetings the SPARTANs had gotten used to as humans, Warcry simply banged one heavy fist on his table to call the meeting to order, nearly knocking his and the 2IC's cubes of mid-grade off the almost flat surface.

"Alright bots! Confess now, and save the rest of us the processor ache of getting this slag dragged out of you one by one." His soldiers cracked some grins, but that was as far as any of them were willing to go for such a horrible pun. Galeforce pulled out his well-used data pad to record the meeting on.

"I do believe you are first, sir." Shadowdancer leaned on her table, shared with the other Covert Ops bots with the exception of Drax, with one elbow joint. "That means the rest of us are stuck staring at your ugly mug until you get on with it."

The tank CO glowered at his XO as the others started to snicker.

"Fine. What did we do? Galeforce and I enlisted as Autobots, Silentforce nearly got deactivated then he enlisted, we picked up two additional mechs, and Refit is not the unit's medic yet." He smirked at the few loud groans and continued over the noise. "Which means Ratchet is still the mech to see about malfunctions while you're here!"

Refit giggled to herself from next to Knightblade. Markmaker snorted at both her and the CO from his spot next to the other tank. "I became an Enforcer of Vos and arranged a meeting between the seeker council and Drax."

He looked to the Praxian femme, as she was next.

"I am a property owner as well as a barkeep." Shadowdancer pointedly ignored the half-sparked calls for more high-grade in the unit's rations. "I adopted Kynaite, and started in on psych profiles on the Decepticons' High Command, using the bar as a cover. I have also discovered a possible virus that may have originated within the Decepticon ranks. I'm awaiting confirmation on that."

She pointed to Titan next.

The mech glared at her, but took up the thread of the report anyways. "I am an Enforcer of Tyger Pax, and joined the SWAT team of the city. Nothing else was notable enough to report."

"I am a shopkeeper now, and I come bearing gifts!" Nitro opened his crate and pulled out some very familiar looking grenades. "I ran into a bounty hunter named Axel, who our XO is instructing me in handling."

The tan and gray Praxian began to hand out the incendiaries to the bots they had the roster number engraved on.

"These thermal grenades are a last resort, bots! They can melt through our armor and spark casings in less than an astrosecond, so be careful of your storage options."

Clearsight accepted her grenade with trepidation. "I became a data clerk in Ankmoor, conducting the research the rest of you are too lazy to do yourselves, nothing has happened in my city to report."

"I'm a data courier in Yuss, had one incident with Decepticons, a number of whom were attacking another courier by the name of Blurr." Taking his own grenade, Quickgrip quickly slid it into his subspace.

Rook spun hers on one finger before putting it away as well. "I met Prowl's brothers, bought a warehouse off of Bluestreak, and now teach self-defense near the slums of Praxus. I have Trickflip and the last three femmes he rescued from Kaon living with me at the moment, and I have been looking for a Decepticon by the designation of Swindle in the Praxian thieves' underground when I have the time."

"I had lived as a gladiator for most of the vorn," Orpheus spoke up next, "and have gotten permission to enlist as a Decepticon as soon as I return to Polyhex."

Knightblade gave her fellow SPARTAN a searching look. "I stopped an attack against Perceptor while traveling to Crystal City, by what was probably Decepticon supporters, and he hired me on as both a watcher and as an assistant. Working with Wheeljack and the scientist, we are slowly processing through the unusual systems we have and checking them for any compatibility issues. There is another matter, but that is between me and the XO at the moment."

"I am a supply bot in Central's Autobot base." Holdout redirected the scientist's assistant's attention back to the general report. "I have also housed Refit while she was attending the Cybertronian Academy and Silentforce when he was recovering from Kaon. I also have some amicable relations to the Wrecker unit stationed there."

Trickflip covered his bark of laughter with an unconvincing cough.

"I, uh… yeah, I spent most of the beginning part of the vorn supporting Shadowdancer and Orpheus in Gygax and Polyhex until I was reassigned to Kaon after 'force's unfortunate incident." He ducked the bodyguard expert's backhanded smack for that. "And I had lived with Rook while waiting for Kaon to settle down after I made a pest of myself. Going back to the city once we're done here."

Warcry blinked at Silentforce, who shrugged at him. _:Was a body guard for the Stonewall Defender's guild, until the deactivation of Sentinel Prime. Now I work as a bodyguard expert for the Autobots.:_

"We maintained the _ATHENS_ for most of the vorn in various locations around Cybertron until the 2IC called us in to Vos for something involving other seekers." Drax looked to the commanding officers. "Permission to speak with the commanding officers later."

"Granted." Markmaker gave his fellow officers an apologetic grin. "Seeker and Vos business."

Shadowdancer made a rude sound, but nodded anyways as she accepted the last of the grenades that Nitro was handing out.

"Fine, written reports are expected before you all leave again. Those of you without guest, you may leave at any time _after_ the briefing for the others, checking in with Ratchet or Xenon in the med bay, _and_ seeing one of your officers about your reports." She again ignored the groans at the mention of reports as she got to her pedes. "Drax, what… _when_ do you want us?"

The SPARTAN trine leader rose to his pedes as well and motioned for his trine mates. "Might as well be now, ma'am. We can get rid of most of the seeker council that way."

Markmaker and Warcry followed the four out as the other SPARTANs began to share stories about their assigned cities as they checked over their written reports of the last vorn.

(ooo000ooo)

Lunais, sitting with her broad wing span flush against the outer walls of the Autobot base in the gap allowed for bots to maneuver around without using the high walls' walkway, spotted the SPARTANs first and called over her fellow council members. Tigerstripe and Spotter stopped just before the courtyard the seeker council was occupying, content to watch what was going to happen.

Drax gave a half bow to the council as he introduced the SPARTAN-Bot officers to the seeker council.

"Warcry is our Commanding Officer. You already know Markmaker, our Second in Command. And this is Shadowdancer, our Third in Command and Tactical Lieutenant." He turned to the other SPARTANs. "Whiteout, Lunais, Lightning, Hailstorm, and Quicksilver, the members of the seeker council."

Shadowdancer arched an optic ridge at him, but hesitantly shook hands with the other seekers as the tanks next to her did the same. "It's… uh, nice to meet you?"

Hailstorm inspected the three from helm to pedes and nodded back at the femme. "Yes, nice."

The XO waited politely, protocols when dealing with seekers had been noticeably absent from the Cybertronian data net, making any possible reaction carry with it the likelihood of insulting the touchy frame set. She did pick up on the comm line between the five seekers, her Covert Ops programming begging her to hack it and find out why she was standing there instead of with her sparkling.

Markmaker, well used to dealing with seekers at this point, simply crossed his arms over his broad chest plates and waited.

Warcry looked from his subordinates back to the council bots, and initiated a comm line of his own with the three others with him. { _Any idea on what is going on?}_

 _{I've got two theories, but nothing solid.}_ The other tank replied.

 _{Hush. It's either a test of your patience, which you failed, or a snub, and I don't think it's the former.}_ Shadowdancer twitched her door-wings minutely at them in reproach, gold optics getting progressively narrower the longer the seekers simply stood there.

Drax gave a barely audible sigh, under the audio range of normal bots but just audible to the other SPARTANs. _{They're here to see if I would make an acceptable replacement for the Air Commander, a seeker rank. Lightning said they had to meet you before they made their decision.}_

The Praxian suppressed the desire to raise both of her optic ridges before any physical twitch in that direction could happen. _{That is what this is about? I have half a processor to make them sit in on next cycle's brief just for revenge for this slagging stunt.}_

 _{I was going to ask Lightning and Hailstorm to sit in anyways.}_ The trine leader gave the femme a SPARTAN style grin, no more than a few twitched up parts of his faceplate that only another SPARTAN would ever be able to notice.

Shadowdancer didn't have time to respond, seeing as the seeker council had finally reached a decision and returned their attention to the now less than amused SPARTANs in front of them.

"We do apologize for the inconvenience." The dark tri colored femme spoke up first. "But we need to know if you would release Drax and his trine from your command to ours."

"No." The five seekers jerked and looked at the Praxian femme in various levels of shock. "Whatever the slag it is that you want one of our soldiers for, do so around what his orders are."

Lightning sputtered at her, red optics wide and staring at her in a state of shock.

Hailstorm looked from her fellow seekers to the femme with the narrow gold optics, which seemed to be slowly bleeding red. "I-I… well, I can say _that_ has never happened before."

"Why not?" Whiteout was frowning at the three that Drax called his superiors, looking from one to the other. "You're obviously not relying on them at the moment for anything, so why refuse?"

Shadowdancer finally got to arch her optic ridge. "Why should we agree? You call us out here, without an explanation, and expect… _what_ exactly? Us to hand over our aerial assets just because _you_ share a frame set with them? To blithely ignore the fact that we know them better than you ever could, and just wave bye when you ask?"

"Shadow'," Warcry rested a heavy hand on the femme shoulder joint, pulling her back from the middle of the loose group of SPARTANs and putting himself between his mechacidal XO and the seekers that had just torqued her off to the _Pit_ , "I think what my XO is trying to get at, is that we have no reason to trust you with three of our soldiers without clarification, and even then we might decide not let them go."

Markmaker only smirked when Hailstorm looked to him for help, giving her a shrug to say he had done all he was going to do for them. She looked back at the other femme glaring at her and the metallic green and black tank. "But… seekers have _always_ been autonomous-"

"Frag off." Shadowdancer turned around after snapping at the seeker femme and started walking off. "I have a sparkling to put into recharge. If you _seekers_ have pulled your helms out of your afterburners by next cycle, you can try again later."

Her door-wings twitched in a Praxian insult that only her fellow SPARTANs caught as she walked off without another word.

Quicksilver barked out a laugh once he recovered from the femme's sharp words. "I like her."

"Thought you would. She's _my_ direct superior." Drax's grin widened so the non-SPARTANs could see it. "Quite a piece of work, isn't she?"

The jade green seeker just nodded, rubbing the bottom of his jaw plate as he stared off after the electric blue and black femme. "You can say that again."

Lightning sputtered some more at his fellow's comment, and the SPARTAN trine leader leaned over to slap the mech on the back. "You okay there, old timer?"

"The-the sheer arrogance of that… that _femme_ _!_ Brushing us off for-for… she has a sparkling?" It sounded like the old Air Commander's vocalizer was having difficulties trying to make sense of everything the mech wanted to say.

Markmaker nearly choked on his next silent laugh at the seekers' expense. He cleared his vocalizer before answering the green and gold seeker's question. "Yep. Adopted, but he's her bitlit nonetheless."

Hailstorm looked from one seeker to the next. "But… this has never happened before! We don't have Air Commanders that answer to ground bound bots! It's… it's-!"

She trailed off as her turbines whined, confused beyond measure of the failure of protocols that would normally end with another Air Commander, not a torqued carrier bot of some military unit.

Warcry hefted a sigh. "As Shadow' would say, _deal with it_. You have given us no acceptable reason to turn Drax and his trine over to you, and barring a really good reason, like all of Cybertron would rust without them, we won't be giving you our trine."

The tank saluted the council anyways, figuring that would somewhat make up for the XO's leaving in a stomping huff.

"We'll talk to you later, if you decide to behave like civilized bots."

Looking around at the various expressions of either shock or awe, the remaining tank mech had to laugh again.

"Do you seriously get results with such a backhanded approach?" He asked with a shake of his helm.

"We always have before, but this looks to be an unusual situation." Lunais allowed, staring off after the two ground bound bots before processing the last statement the Enforcer had given and looking down at him bemusedly. "Backhanded?"

"You torqued Shadow' off by saying nothing and making her wait to hear what you wanted. War' generally goes with the tactician's responses, as she has had more combat experience than he does." Markmaker explained. "The fact that you ignored her when she has a sparkling to care for showed you had no respect for any bot without a seeker build. Even if you didn't know, it showed that you had no interest in anything else but what you were after when you didn't ask if they had any other pressing matters to deal with. And that's not generally what you want for the bots that look to you to have to deal with without the buffer of being between the irritants and their subordinates."

"So," Hailstorm tried to parse the femme's actions, "she thought we…"

"Had a pole rammed up your collective afts." Drax interjected when the femme seemed to lose any words for what had happened. "Like she said, you can try again next cycle. Late next cycle, but the offer is there."

Lightning snorted. "With a choice between Starscream and your XO? I think we're good."

Drax shrugged back at him. "Your choice. Now then, if you all don't mind, we have some siblings to catch up with."

"That's fine," Lunais smirked as she got to her pedes, "just know we expect to see you and your trine again soon in Vos for you to start with your Air Commander duties."

The SPARTAN trine leader opened his mouth components to reply before she launched herself up, stopped cold as the meaning sank in his CPU, and promptly stalled as he choked on his own words and tried to yell at the same time.

Quicksilver and Whiteout both slapped the new Air Commander's back before taking off after the shuttle femme. Markmaker blinked after them, then looked to his aerial 'brother'. "You alright there, Drax?"

Slowly, the dark blue and black SPARTAN seeker looked at the 2IC for a moment as both Spotter and Tigerstripe approached the reduced group. "What just happened?"

"Well, that was better than I thought it would be." Hailstorm giggled into her claws as the new Air Commander turned to stare at her. "Your commanding officers are fine by us. An unusual situation to be sure, but they seem like they are more concerned with you than any possibility that your new rank would benefit them. First time this has happened in… _ever_ , really."

Before either of the non-SPARTAN seekers could take off, the remaining tank held up a hand. "One moment. Drax has something to ask both of you, that is, once he starts processing again."

"That… frag you Mark'." The trine leader muttered, rubbing the space under his optics as he tried to place what had happened in his processors. "Hailstorm, Lightning, would you like to know our history?"

The seeker femme looked at the three seekers and the tank mech strangely. "I thought you didn't recall much of your function?"

She had been of the firm opinion over that, and wasn't sure about them letting her believe that when it wasn't true.

"We do." Spotter chimed in, giving his badly shocked trine leader an occasional curious sideways glace. "It's just that we share the same history as our 'siblings', so it was decided that the majority of us had to agree to tell another bot."

Insanely curious over what had occurred, the recon scout was having difficulties trying to suppress the urge to ask about it now.

"Ah. Does that mean that most of your family unit is here?" Lightning gave the tank 'brother' of the newly confirmed Air Commander a searching look.

Markmaker simply shrugged in reply with a strange smirk. "Our unit's a little weird. We call each other 'brother' and 'sister', simply because that is the way we consider each other."

Hailstorm blinked at him in surprise. "Oh… is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

"Depends on your definitions of the words." Tigerstripe smirked as he waved towards the interior of the base. "The hanger bay isn't that bad, and we have room in the _ATHENS_ if you don't want to remain in the base until next cycle's briefing."

(ooo000ooo)

Shadowdancer made her way to the med bay with a slightly grim Spotter in tow. With Kynaite recharging under the watchful optics of Zephyr, the XO decided to get the last of her loose ends tied up before the cycle was out, as she still had to read through the vorn long report from her Covert Ops soldiers before she would be able to leave Iacon herself.

Triggering the med bay's door controls activated the chimes in the medical officer's office at the back of the bay, and as the two SPARTANs stepped inside, Wheeljack opened the office door to see who it was entering the med bay and waved at them once he identified the two. "Hiya, Shadow', Spot'!"

"Wheeljack," the Praxian returned, inclining her helm to him, "would Ratchet be available at this moment? I have a question to pose to him."

The Head Medic of Iacon frowned at the back of his best friend, having heard the femme's question even from where he was.

"In here, Shadowdancer!" The younger medic set his data pad and cube of high-grade down as he waited to see what the SPARTANs wanted.

Wheeljack removed himself from the doorway as the two SPARTANs entered the office. Ratchet was in his customary position, leaning back in his chair with his pedes kicked up on his desk, cube and pad next to his knee joints. The inventor returned to his own seat, positioned before his medically inclined friend from where he had been informing the two medics of his work with Perceptor and Knightblade over the last vorn.

Xenon gave both SPARTANs a nod from the other side of the office, where he was slowly working through the medical data work the lofty rank of CMO earned him. Spotter hung back near the door, giving his attention to the femme that corralled him into following after her once he had reported back about her 'little' problem.

Shadowdancer gave both Wheeljack and Xenon a long searching look, before twitching her door-wings dismissively and taking out a data pad of her own and looking at the Head Medic of Iacon over it.

"Four stellar cycles ago, Kynaite had a bout of some sort of virus. It's wasn't directly harmful, it just made him miserable for a few cycles, but my firewalls failed to prevent it from spreading from me to him."

She handed the pad to Ratchet, one she had once handed to a certain assassin to see what he thought of her findings.

"I couldn't figure out _how_ he got infected until I started to pick through my own programming to see if there were any errors or corrupted files, or even a virus that managed to evade my firewalls. That," the Praxian pointed to the pad now in the medic's hand, "was what I found."

"That shouldn't have happened, though. If you weren't affected with a virus, he shouldn't have displayed the side effects of one." The inventor looked from the Praxian femme to his best friend. "Right?"

"She did have a slagging virus." The yellow medic responded irritably, optic ridges drawn together as he read through what she had handed him. "What I can't figure out is what this fragging thing was written to do. It almost make no sense, most of this code is just _junk_."

The Praxian nodded, not really surprised. She had to take a few cycles just to make heads or tails from it when she first found it. "It took Spotter nearly four joors of work to clean up the 'junk' and get to the actual coding. The second file on that holds what he found between the lines of useless code."

They were expecting it, but both SPARTANs still jerked back at the explosive string of profanities that Ratchet let loose with once he switched the files on the pad around and got a good look at it.

Wheeljack dove off his chair and took cover behind the SPARTAN-Bots' XO, he had only once heard that much venom out of the medic once before, and that had been over his most disastrous project to date. The Head Medic of Iacon all but jumped out of his chair and rounded his desk in one movement, letting the data pad clatter to said desk as he passed it to check on the same Praxian femme his friend was trying to hide behind.

Spotter discreetly helped the inventor up and out of the way as Xenon rounded his own desk to see what had caused such a violent reaction out of his oldest student.

Steering the wary femme out of the office so he could take a in depth look at her processors, Ratchet barely managed to keep his vocalizer even and devoid of the acid he wanted to spit out. " _How long_ have you _known_ you were fragging infected with-with… _that_?"

"Three, nearly four stellar cycles." Shadowdancer consented to the handling much like her sparkling would have, she tolerated it only long enough to devise where they were going before making her way there herself without having to be led. "For an adult framed bot, the effects are almost negligible, besides an increase in aggression and a propensity for violent responses to insults, perceived or real."

"That's not the _Pit-be-damned_ _point_ , Shadow'." He glared at her as the Praxian femme calmly looked back at him. "The longer frag like that has in your systems the harder the glitched out programs are to remove without long lasting effects! And you-you just let the slagging thing _sit!_ "

The SPARTAN-Bots' XO didn't have much to say in response to that, she merely fluttered her door-wings in a dismissive gesture as she hoisted herself up on the repair berth.

Xenon, having won the mini race to see what had bothered Ratchet about the data pad the femme had given to him, walked out of the office still comparing the two programs. "It is cleverly crafted, you must admit. Most of it nonsensical enough to be ignored as simply corrupted code by any internal check, and there are parts that were intended to guide the subroutines that normally maintains the base coding around the infected programs."

" _What_ is it?" Wheeljack, sulking behind the older mech, pouted as he followed the two medics out of the office, Spotter still at his back.

"A fragging _virus_ , 'jack. One that has the side effect in affected bot of aggravating their slagging aggressive response guidelines." Ratchet none too gently pried the back of the SPARTAN femme's helm open to hook up an external diagnostic device. He didn't want to chance getting himself infected until he knew what the ultimate purpose of the program was.

Shadowdancer hummed a moment, drawing attention back to her. "That's not all it does. I mean, yes, the aggressive thing is a little difficult for me to deal with on top of my borderline mechacidal tendencies, but that's not all of it. I think it's an indoctrination virus, written by a very skilled programmer."

Spotter held out a clawed hand for the XO's data pad.

"There's four subroutines inside the program itself, that each have different effects. One is that aggression thing." Taking the pad before Wheeljack could see the display, the recon scout scanned the program before handing the pad back. "Another is some kind of time delayed activation trigger, and the last two is what worries us. One is the slow but steady erosion of a bot's moral coding matrix, the other is a subroutine that prevents a bot from getting checked out by a medic."

As Ratchet had his hands full with an in depth scan of the Praxian's processors, battle computer, memory core, and personality matrix; Xenon took the pad back from the seeker and looked over the section he had pulled up. His quietly uttered curse caused all four younger bots to look at him, but he looked to the femme sitting calmly on the berth. "It can't be removed right now, can it?"

"Nope, not without damaging essential parts of my personality matrix irreparably, or corrupting half if not more of my memory core. We would need more time than we have." Shadowdancer replied, feeling Ratchet's hands on her back still. "Not like I was expecting you to do something for me at the moment, but I brought this to your attention for a reason."

The older medic finally passed the data pad to Wheeljack and positioned himself to look the femme in the optics. "Kynaite?"

"I think his processors were too underdeveloped for the virus to damage his base code like it did mine." She admitted with a flutter of her door-wings. "I can't be sure of that, but I was wondering if you could write up some kind of anti-viral defense program for him if it turns out he doesn't have it already? I don't have the skill, Spotter isn't a medic, and there is the scraplet's upgrade next cycle. No bot would ask if you spent a little more time than usual with him."

Ratchet bit out a few more curses as his instruments reported the same probability of successful repair as the XO had, as well as a more detailed list of the Praxian's now corrupted systems. He carefully unhooked the device and tossed it to a nearby counter to wait until it could be wiped clean, possibly with a magnet or three.

"Writing up a fragging program like that would take me awhile. I would have to either write the slagging thing up this off-cycle and try mainlining energon to keep me online next cycle or get some Pit-spawned bot to write up most of it for me while I recharge."

Xenon made a disagreeing sound. "I can write it, as long as you cover for my absence until mid orn."

"For that matter, you might want to consider a virus of your own, one that would prevent this one from gaining ground in more bots." Shadowdancer held still long enough for the yellow medic to reattach the back panel of her helm before hoisting herself off the repair berth. Catching sight of their horrified looks on the medics' faceplates, she had to grin back at them. "Something that would attack this virus before it gains a hold on a bot. Use the same virus, change the effects and remove most of the junk that causes the worst problems."

Wheeljack gave a contemplating hum.

"That might not be a bad idea." The inventor tilted his helm as he considered the programs before him. "It would have to be gutted of most of the rather nasty codes, and that might affect the integrity of the program, but we could keep the method of transference and most of the subroutines that keep a bot from going to the medics."

"No, we're slagging _not_ , 'jack." Ratchet glowered at his best friend. "The SPARTANs skipping med checks is one fragging thing, they got backups in case some fragging thing goes wrong. Normal Cybertronians are another slagging issue. They can't go without regular system checks as long as these glitched up bots can!"

Holding up his hands, the inventor tried another tack. "Well, we can't have whoever it was that wrote this in the first place finding out we know about it and are working against it! How else will you keep the medics from removing the program the astrosecond they find it?"

"If they process it's an anti-virus, they would actually do the installing in the first place." Shadowdancer offered, looking from one medic to the other. "That would depend on your willingness to ignore the immediate effects of this virus, and how much you think this would require in response to such an attack."

"You're taking that piece of slag to Optimus, right?" Ratchet jabbed his finger joint in the direction of the pad Wheeljack was still holding onto. At the Praxian's nod, the Head Medic of Iacon rubbed his face plate as he thought. "We'll write up the anti-virus and send it out as a fragging firewall booster. Let the Prime know that you, and any other bot that has this slagging virus, will require a few megacycles of defragmenting and processor patches in order to be active duty fit again."

Shadowdancer compressed her lip plates, but nodded again. "I take it that you would want to check all of us before we leave again?"

"Yes," his sudden grin was enough to have both SPARTANs regard him warily, "but since you two are here already, we might as well check you over now."

Before the femme could protest, he pushed her back into the repair berth she had recently gotten off of.

"You need blocks put in place or you'll transmit the slagging thing around, so no arguments."

Shadowdancer flicked her door-wings rudely, but took a seat again anyways when Ratchet glared at her. "Leave me with the virus, if I go back acting different, my regulars at the bar will be able to tell something is off about me. Half of them are Decepticon, and until we know more, that virus may be the only thing keeping them civil to me."

Xenon got a hold on Spotter's wing plates before the recon scout could evade the medics and leave the med bay. "A dislike of medics and forgetfulness of medical checks are intentional side effects of the virus, Spotter, so I would suggest you remain as well."

The younger medic whirled around to glare at the Praxian from where he had gone to collect his tools. "That's not a slagging option, femme! On top of your Pit-spawned mechacidal tendencies, you can't expect to control your reactions if the _fragging_ thing eats away at more of your baseline code!"

"I have plenty of experience in controlling myself. More than any other bot you may know." The SPARTANs' XO shot back just as caustically. "I'm not saying let it continue eroding away at me, just stop it where it's at."

The Autobots' CMO held up a hand before the two could really get into their argument, drawing the attention of all four bots. "Stopping it where it is, _is_ all we can do for the moment. At least, until I can create the anti-viral software for this. Ratchet, I know it grates against our priorities as medics, but she may have a point. Once I have completely analyzed the virus, we'll see about whether or not we can leave Shadowdancer with it without compromising her."

\V/

Seven joors after Shadowdancer left the med bay with Spotter, she returned with Zephyr and Kynaite, the former excited about the sparkling's upgrade and the latter pouting sleepily about his early wake up from recharge.

Nothing had changed much since the XO had left late last cycle with the seeker framed recon scout, Wheeljack had kipped out on one of the repair berths and was still recharging there when the three entered the bay. Since the door's chime had failed to rouse any medic bots out of the back office, the Praxian none too gently kicked the mech's berth to wake him up, seeing as her claws were full with her sparkling.

The inventor was jolted out of his recharge cycle with a start, falling off the repair berth and onto the floor with a graceless and loud thump. Grumbling, the green and white mech pulled himself up with one hand on his abandoned berth to give the femme the nastiest glare he could with a battle mask in his way.

"That wasn't very nice, Shadow'!" Wheeljack gave a half amused and half annoyed flash of blue and orange light at the sparkling's laughing trills at his expense. "Good orn to you too, Kynaite. I see whose side you're on."

"Where are Xenon and Ratchet, 'jack? I'd thought they would still be here." Shadowdancer looked around at the nearly empty med bay for emphasis, giving the mech an arched optic ridge after a silent moment.

Pulling himself up to stand on his pedes, Wheeljack rubbed the bottom of his battle mask as he looked around as his vocalizer fins pulsed a soft green. "Don't know at the moment. I was just in recharge, so give me a breem to find out."

As the inventor ran out of the med bay to check the locations of the two head medics, the SPARTAN stole the mech's berth and sat Kynaite down on her lap. Zephyr snickered as the sparkling promptly slid off started in on his adoptive carrier's right thigh plating. "I look forward to actually getting an answer when I ask him what the Pits he is doing."

"I think he's comparing my systems to something. What, I'm not totally sure. It may have to do with what he keeps telling me is a surprise." Shadowdancer rapped her clawed tips against her purloined berth, watching as the sparkling pulled a new tool, a pair of pliers, out of the recess in her thigh plate and started to twitter over it in awe.

The ex-Enforcer gave her employer's electric blue armor a searching look. "That's another thing I've been meaning to ask you about. Why do you have space for tools carved into the back of your armor?"

The Praxian shrugged with a dismissive flick of her door-wings. "It pays to be prepared."

"…I can see that, I guess." Zephyr allowed, twitching her own back blades as the inventor came peeling back into the med bay and pass the three, heading for the medics' back office. "Are you sure of getting 'naite upgraded here?"

"Zeph', 'jack may be a bit scattered in the processor sometimes, but he is a very good engineer. Ratchet is the Head Medic of Iacon, acidic personality or not, he's a brilliant medic." Shadowdancer's lip plates twitched in a smile as her sparkling sat himself on her armor plate to inspect the workings of her thigh. "I can't really see those two messing up something as simple as a sparkling's upgrade, especially as Xenon, the _Autobots' CMO_ , works with them on a regular basis and took one of the two on as a student."

Resetting her vocalizer with a click, the helicopter blinked at the Praxian before her. She was willing to trust Shadowdancer's judgment, even farther than she had trusted her old Station Chief's, but something about the attitudes of the admittedly few bots she had meet so far nibbled at the back of her Enforcer's programming with a vengeance. "Why would the Head Medic of Iacon, much less the Autobots' own CMO, bother about a sparkling of somebot that isn't an Autobot, or even a resident of Iacon?"

"Few more joors, femme." The tactician gave her femme friend a pat on her shoulder joint, the closest thing she could reach from her 'pinned by a sparkling' spot. "Then you can ask every question in that overly suspicious CPU of yours, and I might actually answer, for once."

Zephyr was about to ask some more questions anyways, but Wheeljack's reappearance with two other mechs behind him stalled her. The ex-Enforcer watched as a tired and much older mech handed off a data pad to the Praxian before leaving the med bay with only a backward wave, the startling yellow medic mech crossing his arms over his chassis and giving the femme sitting on the berth a disgusted glare as she perused the information on the pad.

"You can slagging keep that… Pit-be-damned _program_ , but the first sign of trouble from your fragging baseline codes, and I want you back here immediately. Got it?"

To the helicopter's confused surprise, Shadowdancer simply nodded as she maneuvered herself off the repair berth. The SPARTAN-Bots' XO looked down at her missing thigh plate, and back to where Kynaite had dropped back into recharge on top of her armor plate, clutching the pair of pliers he had been so excited over.

She snorted with amusement before looking back at the two mechs preparing to perform his upgrade. "Do I have to wake him again? He wasn't very happy about it the first time."

Both of them took an astrosecond to record that image in their memory banks before Ratchet shook his helm, lowering his vocalizer to keep from disturbing the sparkling. "We would've had to put him in stasis lock for the fragging upgrade anyways, might as well just initiate the lock now. Out, the both of you Pit-spawns."

He worked the armor plate loose from under the sparkling as he triggered Kynaite's lock and handed it to the Praxian.

Wheeljack waited until both femmes were out of the bay before turning a questioning look onto his friend. "Why send them out?"

Normally, those with sparklings refused to leave said sparklings alone with other bots unless it was with the co-creator. Since Shadowdancer was an adoptive carrier, she didn't have the stringent internal protocols that prevented her from leaving her sparkling in even a secure location without her.

"I want to fragging confirm something before we start." The Head Medic of Iacon started to remove the way too light armor from the sparkling's frame. "Does Kynaite seem a little… advanced to you?"

He piled the soon to be undersized armor plates to one side, noting that his estimate on being too light was a vast understatement compared to normal sparkling weight allowances.

"Well…" The inventor paused in removing the pliers from the sparkling's tight grip and looked back at his friend with a curious flash of green light. "Yeah, now that you mention it. I mean, investigating one's frame isn't unusual, but he looks through Shadow's without any issues like electrocuting himself, even with all the extra features lying about her frame. It should have been way too complex for him."

Ratchet nodded absently as he started to check over the sparkling's deceptively simple systems.

"I think his original slagging creators had him illegally upgraded. I'm not too sure about how well that frag is going to come across for these SPARTANs, considering the _glitched up_ way they were… _built_." His engine snarled loudly in rage as he spotted the first of the illegal upgrades. "This is going to go over like… like… frag it all, I can't think of anything nasty enough to say."

"Err… can we request that Optimus and Ironhide be here when we tell her, just in case?"

Wheeljack didn't really think Shadowdancer would do anything to _them,_ seeing as some other bot was responsible for her sparkling's condition, but creators of sparklings were generally violent about anything that would or could affect their creations negatively. Having some heftier bots around in case the class III SPARTAN femme reacted badly sounded like a really, _really_ good idea to him.

"For that matter, Warcry and Markmaker as well?"

\V/

With his XO off taking care of her sparkling, the CO had to run herd on nearly ten SPARTANs, and one sort of SPARTAN that really should have known better, as well as the assorted guest nearly all of them had brought in the base's rec room with only Titan to help.

It wasn't that it was hard as in physically demanding, thankfully most of the SPARTANs were keeping away from anything requiring a physical display in addition to their gossip, but keeping track of them all to ensure that the conversation subjects were at least somewhat tame and non-incriminating was an processor ache large enough for several bots to share, and since Praxians excelled in such high rate processing like what was required, it made Shadowdancer's missing presence even more felt by the tank.

Markmaker was in charge of taking care of the little details of the mid orn brief that would be held, Holdout had pried herself from her Wrecker suitor temporarily to assist; and the three that had done the prep for the brief before, Knightblade, Spotter, and Galeforce, were all with them in the training rooms the Autobot SPARTANs generally used.

Which left Warcry and the Tyger Pax SWAT Enforcer with two mild curious Wrecker mechs; a close-quarters combat specialist; an assassin that was simply smirking in the back; two new medics chattering over the SPARTANs' systems in another corner with a scientist who knew the truth; two in the dark seekers from Vos' seeker council with two additional seekers that were nearly pouting from being barred from their trine mate for their lack of finesse around delicate equipment; two saboteurs making nuisances of themselves; three Praxian brothers talking in a language and a half; a Praxus Enforcer and his four cassettes snooping about; a painfully socially shy scout; a pair of concerned bonded femmes bothering said scout and their slightly hyper youngling; an infiltrator that had no inclination to help other than serving as a seat for said youngling as she refueled; a bodyguard specialist keeping the twins from making trouble themselves; a somewhat bored demolitions specialist and his bounty hunter friend; which did not include the number of Autobots that came and went in the meantime.

Titan was on the verge of giving up helping his commander, having taken over for the XO when she had to go to the med bay with her sparkling. Shadowdancer had also taken her guest, which only marginally cut down on the confusion.

He was currently trying to 'rescue' Clearsight from the attentions, however well processed their intent was the scout didn't look like she appreciated it at all, of the two adult framed femmes that Trickflip had brought with him. Flashfire had decided that all Clearsight needed to feel more comfortable was a little gossip with another femme, and the painfully socially shy scout was having difficulties stopping herself from shrinking away from the unwanted contact and insulting Trickflip's guests.

At a table nearby Rook was snickering into her hands and Jazz was reclining in a chair with his trademarked smirk as Prowl tried to indirectly warn Smokescreen and Bluestreak of what they were about to hear; with Blaster giving all three Praxian brothers sideways looks every now and again as his cassettes lounged around, trying to discreetly observe the other SPARTANs in the room and puzzle out why they were here. At the same table, Trickflip was avidly watching his two other guests harass Clearsight as he held Silverbell in place as she refueled, keeping the youngling from trying to scale the other SPARTANs' spinal supports and shoulder joints to see how high up she could go.

Next to them, the two seeker framed SPARTANs were trying hard to pretend they had any amount of patience with their third trine member in another part of the base. Any bot watching could tell that Drax and Tigerstripe were failing miserably, judging by the sly smirks the two older seekers were giving them as they picked their way around a relatively neutral conversation.

Sandstorm and Impactor had their own table with Quickgrip and Orpheus, neatly tucked into one corner of the room. None of the four had any intention to move until they were told to, and since the two Wrecker mechs didn't feel like socializing more than they had to without the bronze and black femme around, it was mostly quiet in that corner. The assassin was more interested in observing the interactions of the other SPARTANs with the mishmash of civilian and police bots, while the close-quarters combat specialist swapped stories with Sandstorm over the battles they had seen with the occasional snark on the incompetence of infantry mechs from the dark green and black SPARTAN.

Refit and Jolt were continuing their discussion of the SPARTANs' unusual systems on the opposite side of the room, with Perceptor guiding the two new medics with the marginal amount of information he had devised over the last half of a vorn with Knightblade and Wheeljack's help. That conversation alarmed Warcry the most, seeing as it was the closest he had ever heard the ex-AI admitting something about the sort of illegal frames all the SPARTANs shared.

Not far from them, Nitro was explaining the differences between various high intensity explosives and their uses to Axel as Silentforce made remarks over the public comms about which ones he had used in the past and in what capacity to the bounty hunter's fascination. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker, sitting across from the three, had looked a little more than bored at the subject matter until the demolitions specialist got to distracting uses of various volatile compounds usually given to the Covert Ops, but they were unwilling to leave the bodyguard expert's protection until the XO got over their small mishap with her last cycle and remained even after the Praxian framed SPARTAN mech continued on with the merits of trip mines and the like against mines that detonated with pressure.

Warcry was watching over them all from his table, situated in front of the doors, sitting with Stonewall, Lithium, Steelbrace and Chromia; the former guild bots turned Autobots that had once asked Silentforce about his history before the bodyguard expert had left Kaon for Iacon.

Occasionally, a few other Autobots came in for whatever they were after.

Ether came around to talk to Jazz, which ended up dragging out to an avid discussion between the two Special Ops and the two Covert Ops agents over the effectiveness of certain actions that were generally were left to either group by tactical and infantry; gaining more than a few wide opticed looks from Bluestreak and Blaster and a loud groan from Smokescreen as he tried to deny the conversation had ever occurred in his audio range, Prowl simply busied himself with a cube of energon while the others were occupied.

Elita One eventually wandered in during her break and took a seat next to her sister until she had to leave again, promising to come back for the brief.

A very tired Xenon dragged himself in well after Ether left and slumped in a chair next to the two younger medics, listening with half an audio as Refit and Jolt got into another discussion on alloys verses ceramics and the benefits or drawbacks of both.

Zeta finally gave up and relocated her work space to the out of the way rec room when it became apparent that Prowl had no intention to leave the bots that shared his frame set to face the SPARTAN-Bots' history alone.

Even Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus made their appearances briefly, even if both had indicated that they couldn't stay.

Shadowdancer, reaching the room after checking in with Markmaker about where he was with the prep work, raised an optic ridge at the rather loud volume the group had adapted to be heard over one another when she walked in.

Pressing her lip plates together as she inspected the room, she then exchanged a look with the black and silver helicopter standing next to her. "Well, this promises to be… interesting."

"In what way?" Zephyr remarked, looking over the numerous bots that were apparently in Iacon for the same reason as she was.

"In that I have no idea how these bots will react." The SPARTAN-Bots' tactician replied as she made her way to where Warcry was sitting with Optimus and Ironhide as well as the old Stonewall Defender bots. "I normally have a good idea of the results before I do anything, which makes this the most… _interesting_ event to happen to us in a long while."

She stopped before the massive metallic green and black tank and smirked.

"They're ready for us, sir."


	16. Chapter 16

"So… uh, now what?"

"What the _frag_ do you mean, 'now what'?" Ratchet gave his best friend a less than amused glare as he sorted the youngling's old armor plates for recycling.

He wasn't in what one might say was a good mood to play twenty questions in, he was more worried over the possible reactions of one electric blue and black Praxian femme would have over the condition of her youngling, not to mention the reactions of the other SPARTAN-Bots once they learned of what had been done to the then sparkling before their XO had gotten to him.

Wheeljack glanced over his shoulder joints at the irritable medic, wisely keeping himself busy with finishing up the last of the new armor plates for the still offline Kynaite. "Uh, well… you want to tell _her_ , or should I?"

He avoided naming 'her' for the entire time the two had been working on the youngling, as if keeping from voicing her designation would prevent a SPARTAN sized blow up in a few bare breems when the SPARTANs' XO came back for the scraplet.

The yellow medic's vents cycled out an aggravated sigh as he stacked the old armor and turned his attention to installing the new and slightly darker blue plates. "I don't even want to slagging _process_ how she's going to take this, much less those junk yard _rejects_ she calls 'siblings'."

Looking over the work the two had already completed, Ratchet started taking the larger plates of armor and attaching them. They had removed most of the illegal upgrades that would have complicated the youngling's development, but there were still some features that they couldn't remove without harming him. Not to mention the damage already done to the youngling's processors.

"It's not like she's going to take her anger out on us, right?" Fins pulsing a purplish orange, the inventor fiddled with cleaning his tools for something productive to do.

He had spent more time with the SPARTANs compared to the medic, seeing as he worked with Knightblade on occasion with Perceptor on the SPARTANs' systems, but the SPARTAN-Bots' XO could still unnerve him simply by staring at him.

"I mean, other than keep you suspicions from her and used her circumvent-able carrier programming to investigate her sparkling-I mean, youngling, there shouldn't be a problem, right?"

Ratchet blinked at the back of his best friend, hands stilling on the stasis locked youngling's chest plates. He looked down at Kynaite, back to the inventor, then to the med bay's doors.

There was that whole detail that he noticed about her, being that Shadowdancer _did_ normally respond as any other carrier bot except for the available distance issue she could keep from her adoptive creation when necessary. On top of that not entirely unusual glitch in her medically downloaded carrier programming, was the virus she was infected with that had already made inroads on degrading her moral coding, making any assumption of her actions or lack thereof erroneous even if they had Prowl's best calculations.

It was such a snarled, confused, mess already that Ratchet was starting to dread the orn the XO returned to the Autobots and he or Xenon would be expected to fix, or at least patch, the Praxian femme's internal programming. "…we should fragging call Optimus. There's no telling how that _glitched up_ femme will react now."

Vocalizer fins palling to a yellowish white, Wheeljack put away his tools hurriedly. "I'll get him."

\V/

"So that is why you refused to answer whenever we asked you about what you've done before you came to Praxus. I thought it had to be something very bad for you to ignore any questions about your past, Rook. Well, this is bad. Not in the bad as in it hurts bad, but bad as in I can't believe that UNSC thing got away with it bad." Bluestreak was talking rapidly again, a verbalization of his unease over what he had learned, and Rook had to suppress more than one wince as she followed the merchant, keeping one audio receptor on his run away vocalizer and the other tuned behind her.

She knew telling them had probably been a horrible idea in her desire to keep them as friends, but not telling them when she had the option to would have made it worse when they found out about it later on. Neither Blaster nor Smokescreen had said anything since the brief, and Blaster's cassettes were equally as quiet, as they processed what the SPARTAN-Bots' CO and XO had told them.

Zeta, Prowl, and Jazz followed along in their wake, not really wanting to leave them alone until the others assimilated the information. The group was heading to the same rec room they had occupied before the briefing had occurred, someplace that was relatively neutral ground to the femme's processors. She was almost afraid to look behind her at the two Enforcer mechs, as if by looking she would confirm her very closely held fear that they would not want to associate with her anymore after hearing this.

Still listening with half an audio as the merchant got around to wondering why the UNSC and ONI organizations had gotten away with what they did, she took a seat at their old table in the base's rec room with Bluestreak as Smokescreen and Blaster went to get energon for themselves. "Is what Axel ask true? Are you really war built, and what do you do?"

"Yes, Axel was telling the truth, and I'm a saboteur like Jazz is." The questions were the first ones directed to her, and the gray painted femme gave a strained smile at her favorite student as the Autobots grabbed a few more seats from nearby tables and dragged them over. "That's also where I learned to fight like how I'm teaching you. Most of it is called 'Combatives', the hand to hand combat model taught to all branches of the human military. I've adopted or dropped a few things based on my experiences with the moves, but most of it is still Brazilian Jujitsu, with some Akihito and other types mixed in from the old human developed martial arts."

Bluestreak blinked as he thought about that. "Huh. That's really cool, what else do you know?"

"Most of it is useless now. Some things from before I was taken for the SPARTAN program, a few details from when I was in the program, and a lot of unpleasant things that happened after I became a class two SPARTAN." Rook shrugged dismissively, dropping her optics to inspect her hand when Blaster's red and yellow frame edged in her field of view across the table. "Most of it is all about my part of warfare, sabotage, and Covert Operations. The best ways to evade certain sensors, how most security measures are installed and the most effective way around them that won't cause me catastrophic damage and force me into abandoning a mission, how to pick manual and electronic locks, escape artiest tricks, the best ways to blow up fortifications, and the like."

Concentrated on her hand like she was, she missed the concerned look in Smokescreen's optics.

"Where did they get you from?" He was still having trouble meshing what the Praxian femme had said with the femme sitting with his brother. She didn't look like how he had thought any war built bot would look like, and she definitely didn't act like he thought one would.

"I… I was a street rat, a runaway youngling, in a city called Los Angles on the human's home world. I supported myself by stealing everything I could get my hands on and selling it on the black market." Rook flicked her orange optics up then back down just as quickly as she shifted uneasily in her seat. "I guess I stole from the wrong human back then, because they found me by placing a tracker in one of the items I stole off of one human and traced me back to where I hid during the cycles. They didn't even need a flash clone to replace me, as no one knew that I was no longer on the planet when they left with me."

Prowl raised an optic ridge at that bit of history, filing that away with the other little bits of info the SPARTANs were prone to dropping when bothered by something. "I was under the impression that you all had some sort of family unit that you decided to defend when you became SPARTANs."

"For most of them, yeah." Lip plates twisting in a bitter smirk, the normally light sparked femme shook her helm before looking over at the black and white tactician. "But I and a few of the others had no one left to care about our fate. It was more like the SPARTAN program gave us something to work forward to, instead of simply functioning as we were. The reason ONI and the UNSC got away with us was because no one connected our sparkling disappearances, and the flash clone's degeneration, with the super soldiers on the battle field."

"Did you have a choice?" Blaster finally spoke up, looking from his friend's now not so secret brother to the gray femme trying hard not to look at the Enforcers across from her.

"Not really, no. They told us we could leave at any time during the training, but I don't think any of us really believed them." Her smirk fading, Rook finally looked up to the two she had Ultra Magnus pull from Praxus. "Oh, there were escape attempts, many of them, but after a while it became too much work to keep up and to survive the training, and we just accepted our new functions as SPARTANs rather than continually try to return to a function we didn't even think existed anymore."

Blaster, Rook thought, looked as physically sick as she had ever seen a Cybertronian look. She wondered if his cassettes were fairing any better in his chest compartment as she finally looked to the oldest Praxian brother. Smokescreen had a strange look, almost like he was contemplating the slow deactivation of some bot not in the room. "Are you sure this UNSC thing is gone?"

The femme saboteur snorted, even as the tense feeling in her spark eased. As long as he wasn't angry with _her_ , she could live with them knowing. "If it wasn't when the Forerunner's doohickey went off, it is by now. The other humans would have never condoned all they got away with as well as what they failed to warn the others of."

"I have a question." Bluestreak tilted his helm at her when Rook looked at him, trying to steer the conversation to a more light-sparked topic. "What's a 'black market'?"

"Ah, that," the femme smirked wickedly, "is the market all the thieves and counterfeiters used to spread either stolen or illegal items around without the knowledge of either their local Enforcers or the proper owners."

Rook's, and for that matter Jazz's, smirks widened to a full blown grins at the barely noticeable twitches the two active Enforcers and the two ex-Enforcers gave at that bit of information.

The silver saboteur leaned forward, interested in the alien method of dodging Enforcers as a matter of principle. And not simply because the subject seemed to make both the active Enforcers and the retired Enforcers fidget. "Do tell, femme. Dat sounds… interestin."

\V/

Knightblade, Nitro, and Holdout were trying to teach Perceptor, Axel, Sandstorm, and Impactor how to play poker in the now nearly abandoned training room.

They had terminated the visage of Reach used to prove the SPARTANs' history and had summoned up one of a generic casino from their processors, with the nearly hypnotizing lights flashing from the sides and the green felt card tables that they were making use of.

Most of the non-SPARTAN bots had pulled their respective SPARTANs out of the room and off somewhere to demand some more answers from them, but the remainder saw little reason to make a fuss over what was now ancient history. Perceptor, because he already knew it; Axel, because he knew a bit more detail than what had been stated and didn't feel like processing through the rest of it now; and the two Wreckers because it really didn't matter to them where the SPARTANs had come from, only that they were Autobot inclined and that they could and did kick some serious aft.

When the scientist and the sniper got into a lengthy discussion of why it was that counting the cards was considered cheating in poker, the rest of them only able to follow along because of Knightblade's increasingly exasperated rebuttals about odds and risk, Holdout looked over to her suitor and his commanding officer. "So, issues? Questions? Comments? Anything? You're being rather quiet."

"Naw, not really." Sandstorm shuffled the thin sheets of flimsy material in his hands with red and black marks on one side, trying to recall what cards a flush consisted of and seeing if he had one. "There's the bit of if I ever meet any of these UNSC human things I'll beat them into slag for you, but the rest of it won't affect who you are now, cause it already happened."

The triple changer shrugged, before looking over at her.

"Sides, I like you as you are now. If this SPARTAN thing never happened, I probably wouldn't have ever met you."

Holdout smiled at him, rather touched. "Aww, that's incredibly sappy, 'storm."

"And slightly disgusting. Please recall that Hold' is my sister and there are others present." Nitro pinned the both of them with a glare from across the hologram table. "Go get a room or stop it. My tanks can't take much more."

The tracker drew herself up to start ripping into the demolitions specialist, but suddenly smiled instead at her 'brother', causing the Praxian to regard her suspiciously from over his cards. "You know, that's not a bad idea. We got a couple of cycles of leave left anyways. Come on, 'storm."

As the Wrecker abandoned his cards and happily followed the bronze and black femme out of the training room, Axel blinked after them then at a rather disgusted Nitro. "I guess she wasn't kidding about that Wrecker mech that would've beaten me to slag if I kept flirting with her."

"Nope, and she would've told him about that too if you had kept up annoying her." The tan and gray mech shook his helm as he flinched the two's cards off the table. "Can't believe she just did that. And gave up perfectly good pairs of aces and kings too."

Impactor cleared his vocalizer as he looked from one Simfur bot to the other. "So you're the brother she went to go help a few stellar cycles ago?"

"Yep." Nitro twitched his door-wings in an affirmative gesture that was lost on the Wrecker Commander. "That was back when Axel first ran into me. I needed her… let's just say advice."

The bounty hunter winced at the reminder of that first 'meeting' of both SPARTANs and slouched behind his stack of strangely colored chips. Admittedly not one of his better cycles, or prouder ones, for that matter.

The one handed mech, who had been spearing the holographic cards with his harpoon when he needed to move the cards held in his only hand, looked like he was going to ask another question, but the two scientifically inclined players finally agreed that counting cards was still cheating since there was only one deck of cards and turned their attention back to the game before Knightblade noticed the two missing players. "Where's Hold' and her mech?"

Impactor cleared his vocalizer to cover his sudden bark of laughter as Nitro gave his other sister an apologetic flap of his door-wings as he cringed. "I… um, kinda told them to get a room."

"…right." The sniper gave her brother a long look. "With those two? You have noted how many times that slag leaked though the tactical up-link before Shadowdancer had enough of vicariously experiencing what Holdout was feeling and set Spotter to building up the link's filters, right? That was like giving the two permission."

The Praxian mech hunched down farther in his chair as he muttered and switched around a few of his cards. "Not like either of them seem to need it."

"Tactical up-link? I thought those were only used by tactical bots in charge of large territories." Axel gave up trying to make sense of his cards and folded his hand. He had the sneaking suspicion that he would have lost anyways. "I've heard their also incredibly invasive to one's privacy."

"That might be true." Knightblade took a quick peek at what the bounty hunter had discarded and snickered softly before setting the cards back down. "Then again, we never had much privacy to begin with, so we couldn't tell you if it was."

\V/

Shadowdancer seemed completely calm and collected as she waited outside of the med bay for the medic and inventor to get done upgrading her adoptive creation, and for the first time Zephyr had to wonder how much of that unruffled poise was faked and how much was from a genuine inability to understand how frightening she could be at times.

The ex-Enforcer waited impatiently for the Praxian femme to collect her new youngling so the two could talk. Her Enforcer programs searching through the nearly half a vorn of association with the Praxian framed SPARTAN femme and tying a few of the more puzzling occurrences she had to military calibrated reactions, some of which made the helicopter cringe in horror to recall the situations that led to the confusing events.

More than a few of the odd reflexes and actions that had come out of Shadowdancer were explainable with the information she had just shared. There was the dislike of contact and the inability to let some slight to her frame go would match up with a highly trained soldier, bot or not, that knew she was more than just good but was also acutely aware of how one was vulnerable in social behaviors that restricted movement.

There were a few things that still didn't match up even with the new information, like why Shadowdancer had taken on Kynaite as her sparkling in the first place. Operating with such a liability was like trying to tow a bot twice your size, possible but extremely difficult with the possibility of serious consequences.

Brooding about the near misses she had nearly come face to faceplate to in her association with the SPARTAN-Bots' XO and compiling the questions she was sure the other femme was expecting, Zephyr nearly missed the arrival of Optimus Prime, Warcry, and a black mech she didn't know that positioned himself behind the two other Autobots. Shadowdancer didn't, and saluted the two officers before politely subspaceing the data pad Xenon had given her before she had dropped off her sparkling earlier that cycle.

The Autobots' Prime looked to the electric blue and black Praxian femme and held up his hands in a placating gesture. "Shadowdancer, I do not wish to alarm you, but there has been a complication with Kynaite's systems you need to know about."

"…that is not a reassuring statement, Optimus." Shadowdancer's vocalizer remained as even as ever, but the Praxian's door-wings had arched sharply and her optics had narrowed, broadcasting her sudden state of alert to all four bots in the hall with her. "Normally, when you are trying to keep from alarming a bot, you should start with a reassurance, before continuing to bring attention to the problem."

"Noted." Lip plates twitching in what was probably misplaced humor at the femme's correction, the Prime palmed the door controls of the med bay open. "And you have my apologies. Kynaite is functioning perfectly fine and his upgrade to his youngling frame was successful. However, Ratchet has made a discovery that needs your attention."

"Better," the Praxian femme's door-wings dropped minutely as she considered the three mechs before her, "but whatever it is, is obviously serious enough that it has the medic so concerned that he's willing to call in backup in case I don't take whatever it is well?"

"Pretty much, Shadow'." The SPARTAN-Bots' CO gave his XO a grin, one that didn't quite hide the concern he was still grappling with. Ratchet wasn't prone to over reacting unless it happened to include stupidity, and the tank couldn't match the femme up with any of her actions being stupid. "Though, you should feel flattered he decided they needed so much power just for little old you."

Keeping herself silent in the exchange, Zephyr had to bite her lower lip plate from snorting at the tank's statement. All three mechs towered over the much slighter executive officer, but having seen said femme in action during more than a few bar fights, the ex-Enforcer was wondering where the rest of their backup was.

Shadowdancer had apparently been processing in the same path as her helicopter friend. "You and what army? I could beat the plating off two of you before you could blink at me."

"Well, I don't think either of us is going to react as badly as these bots seem to think we are." The tank simply shrugged at her sideways look, telling her that he had no idea why they all where there either. "But, better safe than sorry."

That phrase made the Praxian's door-wings twitch compulsively, but before any of the non-SPARTANs could figure out what had just happened to surprise the Covert Ops femme, she twitched her door-wings at Warcry again before looking to the Prime. "I would like to know just what the _frag_ it is you think I need to know. Now, please."

"Ironhide, guard the door. No bot is to be let in until Shadowdancer leaves." Once his bodyguard nodded, Optimus waved the femmes in and followed with the tank after them.

Ratchet and Wheeljack had finished with Kynaite's upgrade and recently rebooted his processors, and the now youngling framed mechling was blearily looking up at the two from where he was sitting on the same repair berth his adoptive carrier had placed him.

He perked up at the entrance of the Praxian femme, nearly dropping the cup of low-grade energon the medic had given him to assist with his new energy draws. "Sshdo'w!"

Warcry smirked at the butchered nickname of his XO, leaning his frame against the med bay's walls, as the Praxian proceeded him to check over her youngling, Ratchet moved out of her way and closer to the Prime, keeping one optic on the youngling's adjustment to his new frame dimensions.

Shadowdancer stopped before Kynaite, with her claws on her hip joints. "Close, but not quite. Try again, scraplet."

"Sssadoh." He frowned as he shyly fiddled with the cup. "Not."

"No." The femme crouched before the berth so she could look up to him. She sent a silent threat to the CO if she ever heard him say what she was going to allow her adoptive creation to call her. "Try… Tasha."

Optimus gave a strange look at the femme concentrating on her youngling, before looking back at the SPARTAN-Bots' Commander with a confused expression on his faceplate.

"Her name from . . . _before_. Well, part of it." The tank rubbed the back of his helm sheepishly, trying to recall if he had ever read the femme's name instead of her roster number. "A Russian nickname used only by close acquaintances. Can't recall her full designation."

Wheeljack's vocalizer fins flashed green, amused at the inventiveness of giving the youngling another name if the, technically third, designation proved too hard as he replaced the newly cleaned tools that had been used in the youngling's upgrade by the medic.

"Hush." Shadowdancer gave them both a reproving look for talking when she wanted to hear her youngling. "Try again, 'naite."

"Ta-ssh-ah," the newly upgraded youngling grinned as he sounded out the alternate name, "Tasha!"

The Praxian nodded at him as she got back up to her full height, top of her helm reaching just under Wheeljack's battle mask. "Good enough. Are you feeling alright?"

"Yes." Accompanied with a quick bob of his helm, Kynaite almost unbalanced himself since he still held himself too loosely for his new weight. His carrier shot out a claw and kept him from tipping over, which he then used like a railing to get to his pedes, setting down the cup before he spilled it. Pulling himself up, the youngling proceeded to get used to his new height and reach by tottering around on top of the repair berth while clinging on her forearm plate.

Shadowdancer clicked her glossa before looking over at the helicopter that had followed her in. "Can you take him for a moment, Zeph'? I'll fill you in later, I promise."

"Sure, we'll wander over to the _ATHENS_ , and go see the rest of his relatives before they all leave." Looking from her employer to the four other mechs in the room, her Enforcer's programming getting all sorts of interesting bits of information to play with in the newest puzzle, she smiled down at Kynaite as she picked him up. "Or we could go back to your carrier's room and work on whatever it is you hid under her berth."

"Bu-berth!" Was the youngling's choice, clapping his hands together in delight. As the helicopter shifted him in her hold, he looked back at the bots watching them leave and waved. "Bye!"

"Well, he's down right pleasant. Wonder how that-oomph!" Warcry grinned at the less than amused expression on his XO's faceplate, holding his side where her elbow joint had impacted strategically between his armor plates.

Shadowdancer huffed at him, but when it seemed like that was as far as the tank was going to go, she redirected her attention to the Head Medic of Iacon with a raised optic ridge. "Well?"

"…how much do you know about sparklings and younglings?" He was expecting it, but when the XO pinched her clawed digits together to show a very brief amount of space between them, he had to wince. "Right. They're not supposed to be able to look though a fragging system as complex as yours without harming themselves."

"Sparklings are clumsy, because they aren't supposed to have the fine motor control software until their first upgrade." Wheeljack set the tools he was sorting and turned to face the mildly confused SPARTANs. "It's not that he shouldn't have been able to look through yours without harm, but he couldn't have the control to pull some of it _apart_ and look around without harm."

"So what?" The Autobots could hear the frustration in the femme's vocalizer, signifying a rapid deterioration of her patience.

Ratchet decided that if Shadowdancer did blow up at the information, he wanted it to happen without her being torqued with the rest of them. Taking a deep intake to brace himself, he plowed on without the distracting information Wheeljack had insisted on supplying with the less than acceptable news to the adoptive carrier bot.

"Kynaite had been illegally upgraded before you slagging found him. Most likely, his original glitched out creators had him upgraded for whatever reason. None of the upgrades had damaged his systems irreparably, but the Pit-be-damned medic or engineer that did the upgrade didn't fragging know what his was doing, and there are a few complications from it."

Two pairs of gold optics blinked at him for a moment as the two ex-Human SPARTANs translated that over into the mishmash of English/Cybertronian they used internally, and the inventor dove under one of the repair berths as the femme's optics bled red and her door-wings arched high. " _WHAT!_ "

Warcry lunged for her, catching the Praxian by her shoulder joint and one door-wing before she had made it half way across the room, jerking her to a halt before she could threaten harm on any of the mechs. Optimus took a step between the medic and the tactician, trying to figure out how she had moved so far in such a small amount of time.

"Whoa, Shadow'! Settle down!" The tank pulled the femme off her pedes and held her in the air, trying to keep her from twisting out of his grip.

He was having difficulty, since all Covert Ops trained bots had intimate knowledge of how to get out of another's grip when they didn't wish to be held. She took exception to the handling and kicked the tank's helm hard enough to leave a dent in his heavy armor, forcing him to drop her as his processors reeled from the unnecessarily hard jolt.

As the SPARTAN-Bots' CO staggered a few steps back, the dent being the least amount of the damage she had caused him, the XO hit the ground lightly and turned on the medic, optics still red. To the Autobots' relief, she seemed to be succeeding in keeping herself still, if not calm, and she remained in one place as she hissed at Ratchet.

"Who _fragging_ did it?"

"I haven't a _slagging_ clue in the _Pit_!" Warily watching the femme for any further hostile reactions, the medic took a few steps to the side to get the Prime out of her immediate line of sight.

He didn't want her conflicting programming to identify Optimus as an obstacle to assuring her creation was functioning if it came down to it, as both her adopted Carrier and base Guardian programs insisted on different reactions to the information. Adopted or not, Shadowdancer still reacted like any other carrier with the only exception being that she wasn't panicky when Kynaite was out of her sight.

Wheeljack glanced between his friend and the SPARTAN carrier bot. "I might, but I can't be certain."

When the femme's red optics flicked to him, the inventor flinched but stood his ground. He had never seen one of the SPARTANs' optics turn red before. In a Cybertronian it meant that every internal safety coding had been turned off in preparation of doing some bot serious, if not fatal damage, and was on the border of panicking, but his previous marginal experiences with this particular femme gave him the suggestion that it wasn't them she was torqued with therefore she wouldn't harm them unnecessarily.

"Before the Golden Age ended, I worked with some other engineers in Kalis for a few vorns, well before the city was destroyed. I think this is the work of one of them." Encouraged when her optics started to reacquire their normal metallic gold around the edges, he continued. "I really don't know what happened to him, but the mech's designation was Hook. The upgrades had the same minute detail work that he was known for back then."

Shaking off the kick his XO gave him, and the accompanying vertigo that caused him to feel unbalanced, Warcry stepped closer behind the mechacidal femme just in case. Shadowdancer spared him a less than pleased look before looking to Ratchet again. "What kind of complications?"

Judging the worst of the possible reactions over, she hadn't hissed at them this time, the medic relaxed his guard.

"Like his slagging speech problem, which is correctable with a linguistic patch later on. It was caused by this fragger Hook clipping a bit of the sparkling's processors, fortunately a repairable part, when installing the youngling grade motor control hardware." He flinched a bit when her optics flashed red quickly, but they faded back to their normal gold just as fast and he continued cautiously. "I'll write up the slag we found and their possible effects and give it to you when you check out with that helicopter and Kynaite."

The Praxian regarded him for a quiet moment, before turning back to the tank and speaking up in a language that the three other bots in the med bay were unable to understand. The conversation lasted three breems, and the watching mechs couldn't tell much other than the fact Warcry had objected to something that Shadowdancer had asked of him, but finally agreed to something else with a heavy sigh.

The Praxian flicked her door-wings at him, then turned to the medic and engineer. "Thank you for your work, Wheeljack, Ratchet. I'll start sending the others through for you to scan for that virus."

She shot the tank another look before walking out of the med bay.

"Well… yeah, this is going to be… _unpleasant_." Warcry rubbed the bottom of his jaw hinge as he cast a look over the other three. "So. Out of curiosity, what virus are you scanning for?"

"What was that about?" Optimus blinked at the closed doors, trying to make sense out of the growled language and ignoring the tank's attempt at changing the subject. He had a feeling that he was going to need to know. "It didn't sound Cybertronian. Was that the human's language?"

"Yeah, that was what we called English. As for what it was over," the metallic green and black mech shrugged a bit helplessly, "Shadow' was asking permission for a few things. Other than that, all I should tell you is that right now 'plausible deniability' is your _very good_ friend."

The Prime shot him a disbelieving look and a frown. Warcry had started to tell him some of the things the UNSC and ONI had done when the SPARTANs had been in the Milky Way Galaxy, that particular phrase had come up more than once with some of the more disturbing actions and misdirection the human military and political branches had gotten away with. "That is not an option, Warcry."

"Didn't think so, but you really won't like where this is going to go." The SPARTAN-Bots' CO looked between the three mechs looking at him expectantly, and hefted another sigh and started editing out bits of the conversation that he knew for a fact none of the Autobots would like. "She asked for Nitro to be reassigned to looking into the illegal upgrade mess you have, and permission to find out if this Hook mech is still functioning. Since Nitro is a merchant, and Simfur has a high rate of illegal upgrades anyways, Nitro would be able to find out better than she should, but she still wants to look. If Hook is still functioning, she wants to pay him a visit."

"That doesn't sound bad enough to be conducted in another language, War'." Wheeljack flashed the mech a burst of orange light, suspecting like the Prime that there may be more to it than the tank was saying. "What is the real problem?"

"Well, she first asked to be given a few megacycles of leave to look for the mech herself. Then, there were some rather unpleasant threats made in his direction and at any other bots that thought they had what it took to upgrade sparklings without being skilled enough for it." Warcry rocked back on his heel stabilizers as the three exchanged looks. "After that, it was Nitro's reassignment, and some more threats and a few… creative methods of asking questions she was planning on using."

"That still doesn't sound that bad." The inventor pointed out.

The tank just looked at him. "Her methods include an energy knife, some barrels of strong acid, and a few joors, if not cycles to ask her questions slowly, 'jack. Most of her threats where along the same general line."

Wheeljack's vocalizer fins flashed yellow. "…oh."

Ratchet kept his reaction to that to himself, mostly because it was along the lines of _glitched up fragger deserves it_. "In answer to your other question, we're looking for what Shadowdancer termed a slagging indoctrination virus. All of your Pit-spawned soldiers have to get checked out, and that will tell us where to send the anti-virus software first."

Optimus jerked around in surprise again, and the medic had to suppress the desire to swear at the femme who had obviously failed to inform the Prime of the virus before their meeting. " _What_ kind of virus?"

\V/

Having endured the close confines of the interior of the Autobot base for far longer than either of them were used too, Hailstorm and Lightning had relocated themselves to the outer courtyards with the SPARTAN trine and Markmaker following along.

The seeker femme hadn't stopped pacing in circles since the six had reached the nearest open courtyard, and the old Air Commander was starting to get tired of the scraping sounds as the femme walked. "Would you reboot your fragging CPU already, Hail'?"

The resulting retaliating screech from the femme made the tank wince, not having the built in filters apparently all seekers did to make such a sound normally used in high altitudes comprehensible as anything other than static, and Hailstorm gave him an apologetic twitch of her wing plates as she switched vocal speech methods. "I-I'm sorry, Markmaker. But, this… this is rather hard for me to…"

"Understand? Adjust to? Flat out ignore?" Tigerstripe had taken a seat next to a conveniently placed wall and had contented himself to just watching, but her unease with the four SPARTANs made him uneasy. "None of us will blame you if you decide you don't want to see us anymore."

"There are a couple of bets going about which bots would flat out reject us, knowing what they do now." Added Spotter, rubbing the side of his neck cables and missing the femme's aghast expression at the mere suggestion that she would decide to do something so stupid. "We kinda have to work it around Shadow', because she doesn't approve of gambling, but she probably already knows."

"That- _that_ is not a-a… really?" Hailstorm looked over the three SPARTAN seekers. "Why would some bot not want to know you? You're built by the All-Spark, for Primus' sake!"

"That's a rhetorical question, right?" Markmaker gave her a searching look. "Built by the All-Spark or not, we are still war built bots, with all the nasty connotations _that_ brings to the table."

"Add the tiny little fact that we are not Cybertronian originally, and some would simply flat out prefer to ignore our existence." Shrugging as the femme whirled on him, Drax looked over to the other seeker as the femme grappled with what she wanted to say. "What about you, old timer?"

"Makes some sense now, if you think about it." Lightning grimaced at the second screech the femme gave him for that, and pointedly looked over the three alien alt forms the SPARTAN seekers had to draw her attention. "Look Hail', they know more about ground bound warfare than they do aerial . . . what did you call it Drax? Dog fights?"

The mech gave a rev of his turbines, not entirely sure what a 'dog' was, but it must have been some type of viscous aerial creature they knew of.

"Not only are they more experienced in ground warfare, but they act like any other soldier I ever knew. With their unfortunate functions as ground bound organics, they leaned everything we need for this conflict that is about to explode on our runway. Now they are seekers by the grace of the All-Spark itself, and are in position to keep us from doing something slagging stupid in the upcoming vorns. That means all we need to do is ensure that they know seeker tradition, and Primus has ensured we will survive."

The four SPARTANs exchanged a few uncomfortable looks at the mention of Primus, but neither council seeker noticed. Hailstorm threw up her clawed hands in exasperation.

"I just… fine. Your right, it does make sense. A sickening amount of sense, but… but it fits." She sighed, looking at the four SPARTAN mechs watching her with a mournful expression. "It's just that… the sheer unethical _exploitation_ of your younger function bothers me."

Spotter snickered. "We never pretended our history was pretty or comforting."

The SPARTAN trine leader smacked the smallest seeker on the back of his helm. "Stop laughing, Spot'."

"Okay, okay. Sorry." The recon scout was still smirking, which made his apology as unconvincing as could be. "So, now that this slag is over with, what was the final decision on the Air Commander thing?"

Hailstorm gave a weak grin at the silver seeker. "We decided on Drax."

"Which means you three are switching with me." Markmaker slapped the nearest SPARTAN seeker, who happened to be the trine leader, on the back with a slag eating grin. "You all get Vos, and I'm allowed to bounce around like you all did."

"You're not leaving right after this like Trick', are you?" Asked the largest seeker of the SPARTAN trine, looking over to his tank framed brother in concern. "I like being able to talk to you in base metals, instead of across a comm."

The tank snorted as he looked to the seated seeker. "Not fragging likely. I'd have to get any transfer approved by the Enforcers, and while I'm sure Ultra Magnus wouldn't mind switching me around if it comes to it, I'll do it the normal way. I'll put in for a change of city as soon as we get back, but it may take a few decacycles, or even a few stellar cycles, before anything gets approved."

\V/

Sitting in her favorite mech's lap, Silverbell watched her panicky carrier being reassured by her creator. Over what she wasn't sure, but she knew it had something to do with the mech that was holding her and the incredibly boring meeting about Trick' and his family unit that she had to stay online during.

Trickflip just watched the two other femmes like she did, but he seemed bothered by something. Poking him in the side, Silverbell smiled at him in an effort to reassure him. "What is it?"

"I might have done something that will make your creators not like me anymore, Hell's Bells." The infiltrator admitted slowly, still keeping an optic on the two adult framed femmes.

"That's silly. You saved us, why wouldn't they like you?" The youngling beamed up at him, causing a small answering smirk to pull at the mech's lip plates.

"Well, there are a few bits in my past that make me not like me." Trickflip countered, smirk replaced with a grimace. "They are certainty entitled to not like me."

Silverbell huffed in his lap, crossing her arms over her small chassis and accidentally jabbing the acid green and black mech in the gap between his chest plates. "That's stupid. I like you."

Her louder than necessary declaration caught the attention of her creators, causing Flashfire to pointedly glare at her bonded. "Bells is right, Ruby. He saved you when I asked him to. There was no reason for him to, he even admitted he was lagging behind in the city because he didn't want to leave the other Autobot supporters there without the possibility of being saved. He even invited us to stay with him at his sister's place, and Rook has been nothing but helpful since we got there. Are you trying to say Rook is a bad influence too?"

"That's not what I meant, and you know it." The red femme countered, trying hard not to insult the mech that had ensured they would survive after rescuing her. "It's the fact they're war built. Not something a youngling needs to influence her development with."

"That's not going to be much of a problem." The infiltrator shifted back when the two adult framed femmes focused on him. "I'm heading back to Kaon as soon as this is over with. The only war built in the dojo then would be Rook, and you know she's normally busy all cycle."

"What! No!" The youngling twisted around to directly look at the mech serving as her seat. "Kaon is a bad place now! You can't go back!"

Trickflip hesitated, then assisted the youngling in resituating herself. "Sorry, Hell's Bells. But I have to go back to work. I've technically been on leave the entire time I was with you in Praxus."

"But!"

"We're moving out of the dojo anyways, Bells." Flashfire offered apologetically. "Remember? You were the one that wanted to tell both Trick' and Rook after this… event."

Silverbell's lower lip plate trembled. "But, that was before Trick said he's going back to Kaon. Now I won't get to see him anymore."

"Come on, Hell's Bells. If everything I've gone through already hasn't deactivated me yet, I highly doubt a few stellar cycles in Kaon is going to." The infiltrator wisely left out the incident with Silentforce nearly getting deactivated in the same city. "If you tell Rook, she can tell me when your upgrade is, and I'll see about making it back for it. Promise."

Pouting, but accepting that bargain for limiting her complaints, the youngling shifted herself around again to face her creators. "This sucks."

Ruby's lip plates twitched upward, hearing one of Rook's favorite cut off curses come out of her youngling. Even after a few long stellar cycles, the gray femme had problems recalling that a youngling was living with her and that cursing was not acceptable to the two creator femmes. "Yeah, it does. Trick', for what it's worth, I appreciate what you've done for us. We'll keep in contact with Rook when we get back."

Trickflip nodded at her as he passed the youngling on to her creator. He had already decided to start preparing for his stint in Kaon as soon as Flashfire and Ruby were comfortable with what they now knew. "Then, if you femmes don't mind, I have a mission to get ready for."

Silverbell waved sadly as the mech left the three in the Autobot base's room they were assigned.

\V/

The only thing Sunstreaker had to say after the briefing from the Pit was, "Cool."

Sideswipe was of a totally different frame of processor, his reaction was more along the lines of 'What the _slag!_ ', but Galeforce was a bit busy answering all of the gold twin's questions for the silver one to get a word in edgewise.

Sunstreaker wanted to know what facet of warfare each SPARTAN knew, and what skills each job classification required. The extra time gave the swordmech a few breems to contemplate what it was that bothered him so much about the SPARTANs' history.

It wasn't the whole 'originally organic' bit, or even the All-Spark twist. It was the whole war built and still fighting angle that freaked him out of his spark. Sideswipe couldn't imagine going from what sounded like two galactic sized wars straight into another _willingly_ , the whole idea of it made the swordmech cringe internally.

Either the SPARTANs were _very_ focused on what they were built for or they really didn't know another way to function, but that made the silver mech try to contemplate a future where there wasn't a war or conflict for the SPARTANs to focus on. As he was trying, his twin rudely nudged him in the side when Galeforce asked a question of him and he was too wrapped up in his processor to notice.

As the silver twin looked up in surprise, the combat engineer looked him over critically. "Should I call Ratchet and tell him you're on the verge of locking up your pistons, or are you willing to share what's got you so tense?"

"Well… I-err, that is," Sideswipe fumbled for something to say, but with both his twin and the SPARTAN looking at him, it was harder than normal to think up an excuse, so he went with the truth, "what are you going to do when the war's over with?"

Leaning back in his chair, he had led the two into the _ATHENS_ ' rec room for some privacy, the gray and green mech frowned thoughtfully. "Go back and ensure the Covenant are not about to attack the humans again, then probably a few of us will get reformatted to civilian frames and all of us will try to disappear."

"That's it?" He had been expecting something more… war like. The swordmech gave the engineer a long searching look. "You're not going to continue on and try to find another war to get involved with?"

Galeforce snorted.

"Like either Refit or Holdout would let us." The SPARTAN mech shrugged dismissively. "Hold's too attached to her mech to just up and leave, Refit's got her marching orders from Halsey to find us a place to _live,_ not fight, and the others are finding places where they'll fit in for after. Then again, Rook may just flat out reject the idea of another move too. I might just stay an engineer and go help Wheeljack once this is over with."

"And that's it? The SPARTAN thing would die when the last of you deactivate?"

"Well, I wouldn't say that." With a grin, the combat engineer leaned forward like he was going to share a secret. "Your both almost SPARTANs, and there is Kynaite to think of. Oh, you won't ever get to be as good as us, but you'll be SPARTANs too."

After a moment, his grin faded and he continued seriously.

"Those of us that are class twos had figured we'd be the last of it, but then there was the class threes that ONI created without telling most of us or Halsey. I'm not saying it was the right thing to do, but it seems like if there is a need there is a SPARTAN somewhere ready to take up the fight."

That sounded more like a threat than a reassurance, but it eased some of the issues crowding the silver twin's CPU. As his worry faded, his gold twin took back up the conversation he had been having about the assassin's job lot.

\V/

Since Elita One had attended the brief again, she led her sister and the other old Stonewall Defender guild bots to Ultra Magnus' office for the expected questions. The military commander gave his lieutenant an arched look at her late entrance, but that faded into something much like resignation as he recognized the bots following her. "I see Silentforce got around to telling you all."

"You knew?" Chromia demanded of both her sister and the higher ranking mech.

Magnus gave up trying to complete the reports on his desk and gave the four his attention. "We knew. The… well, second thing they did was tell us, that was nearly a vorn ago now. First thing was keep the units we thought we were going to lose alive in a fight with Decepticons just outside of the city's gates."

Steelbrace held his silence, merely watching the bodyguard specialist out of the corner of his optics. He had to admit, if only to himself, that the knowledge of what type of mech he had so casually joked around with before bothered him now when paired up with the metallic red and black SPARTAN.

The traditional idea of a war built bot was one that had no other function other than warfare, one that would react negatively at the very mention of no longer having a purpose. Silentforce didn't act like such a bot, but then again, no bot had asked him what he had wanted to do. As far as Steelbrace could figure, the red and black mech got marching orders and lived with that.

Lithium was on the other side of the spectrum. She had been fascinated by the stoic mech's work ethic before she knew what he was, and the new information simply made a few things clearer to her. Like the success rate of the jobs he had been sent out on, it was very likely that simply disobeying or even bending the rules slightly would have never occurred to him, and she was mourning the lost opportunities to use him for the less enjoyable jobs she had taken because she didn't want any other bot to mishandle them.

Looking from between the bots that knew and the ones that just found out, Stonewall had to admit he only had some rather strange concerns. It made even less sense for a unit of war built bots to let one of their own go without ensuring they were repaired, and the mech's vocalizer issue still bothered him. Why it was that the history of the same mech didn't so much as make him twitch was mostly because he had figured out on his own that whatever the truth was he wouldn't like it when he heard it.

Chromia huffed disgustedly and turned to Silentforce with her hands on her hip joints. "I'm sorry. Next time you tell me I don't really want to know, I'll trust you on that."

The stoic mech simply smirked at her before looking over the other three. He winced when he caught the wary look in Steelbrace's optics. _:I said it wasn't very nice.:_

Barking out a laugh, Stonewall smacked the slighter mech on the back. "That you did, but I don't think any of us were expecting it to be that bad."

Jolting forward a bit under the mech's hand, the bodyguard specialist gave him a disgusted look. : _I have some reports to finish before Shadowdancer beats mine out of me. I'll see you all later._ :

With a last glance at the last mech keeping silent in the room, Silentforce left.

Once the door closed, the silver and gray mech turned to look at the two Autobots near the desk. "How can you-?"

"Despite what they say, they are not truly war built." Magnus had caught the metallic red and black SPARTAN's actions and correctly guessed the reasons why. He now stared down Steelbrace and tried to answer the mech's issues. "They were not programmed to be, the only programming they had was a sense of loyalty to each other and this UNSC group that created them. Yes, _physically_ … they are built for war, you can ask Perceptor, Ratchet, or Wheeljack about that if it concerns you. But from what they've said, each had a decacycle at the least to function as a normal sparkling before the SPARTAN program turned them into the soldiers you see now."

"So it was a reformat." Lithium was nodding to herself even as she spoke. "They said augment, and that usually means that most of their base systems are left alone. I was wondering about that."

"Well, from SPARTAN to Cybertronian, that was a reformat." Elita amended. "From what they were to SPARTAN, that was either an upgrade or an augment. At least, as near as Ratchet can figure. Organics are a little different in their systems than our own."

Frowning, Steelbrace shook his helm. "Whichever it was, you can't tell me they are not simply war machines."

"I can't." Magnus agreed, sitting back in his chair to reach a low desk drawer and pulling out a data pad that contained the SPARTANs' decacycle reports on it. "However, why would a war machine risk himself to save a bonded pair and their creation when he had orders to leave a city? Or to adopt a sparkling of bots she didn't know and limit herself to a support role in combat until he is fully upgraded? How about a femme that occupies a war built frame but just wants to be a medic? Warfare is their purpose, but not the only one."

He handed the pad to the silver and gray mech with a neutral expression, wondering if he would be able to address the mech's fears.

"Trickflip, Shadowdancer, and Refit."

Elita ticked off the bots spoken of on one hand as Steelbrace looked through the reports.

"Big bad bots, to be sure. Well, Shadow' is," she snickered as she recalled how tense the femme had been before her vorn long stint in Gygax, "you should have seen her deal with Sentinel when he was still functioning."

Chromia snorted at the idea of the little medic femme being a threat. "I like Refit. She seems more like an overly happy femme than any crazy sounding artificial intelligence thing."

"You can't be trying to tell me this isn't disturbing you," the gray and silver mech protested, looking up from the pad and at one bot to the others, "they're fragging-"

"Brace," Stonewall rested a heavy hand on the back of his subordinate, "there is nothing you can tell me to make me believe that Silentforce and the rest of his unit are simply too dangerous to even know. Yes, they are well versed in warfare, but that is not a reason to straight out reject them."

At the mech's disbelieving jerk, the older mech tightened his hold and turned to face him squarely.

"We had a few stellar cycles to see how 'force acted before we knew this. What did that tell you?"

"He's a workaholic," forcibly reminded of the odd off-cycles he had spent in the silent mech's presence, Steelbrace actually thought through his association with the SPARTAN as his grip tightened on the pad, "got one Pit of a dry sense of humor, and is needlessly formal most of the time."

"Yeah, really scary." The blue femme scoffed, crossing her arms over her chassis and glaring at him. "He's been getting better about that workaholic thing, but he's still prone to working until _he's_ tired, which takes for fragging ever to happen."

Lithium gave the other femme a glare as her sister smacked the back of her helm. "The formal manner is rather cute. Unexpected now a orns, but still refreshing when paired with the rather crude protocols that younger bots seem to prefer now."

As one of those younger bots, Chromia stuck out her glossa at the older femme. Stonewall gave Steelbrace a gentle shake before releasing him.

"Don't do anything you're not entirely sure of, Brace." The older mech gave the Military Commander of the Autobots a sideways look. "I'm sure if you give them the impression that you don't want to see them, they'll do their damnedest to avoid you for as long as they can."

"Probably." Ultra Magnus agreed, watching the slighter mech that had gone back to reading parts of the data pad. "I do know of a bet the SPARTANs have going on about which bots will react the worst to them."

He grinned at the wide opticed looks directed at him.

"I don't think any of you topped that list, but I do know Trickflip was concerned over the femmes he brought in, and Rook was worried over her Enforcer mechs. But I do believe that the seeker contingent of the SPARTANs were pretty sure none of the seekers they brought with were going to take it well."

"Take it well?" Chromia snorted and hunched her shoulder joints inward. "There really isn't a whole lot any of us can do about it. It's history, the ancient past. It's not like they can say, 'Oh, you don't like it? Okay, it never happened.' and still be telling us the truth."

Elita smiled softly at her sister. "They've been trying hard not to tell any bot anything that isn't the truth. Which requires quite a bit of misdirection for bots that don't know of them yet."

"You can say that again." The femme weapons expert shook her helm as she recalled some of the conversations she had with the SPARTAN defensive specialist. "Though twisty is more like it."

"Don't feel bad about not catching on." Magnus looked at the data work he still had to complete and decided to work on it later before digging out a few cubes of high grade he normally only kept on hand for really bad cycles. "Ratchet thinks they're smarter than _they_ let on. He's got copies of their frame blueprints and system layouts in his medical files, and he's been checking through most of the unusual additions to them in what little spare time he has. There is a lot of work done to their processors and neural systems, most of which some of them have admitted as the augments done before becoming ready for deployment as SPARTANs."

Passing out the cubes and taking back the data pad from one thoughtfully silent mech, the red and blue Military Commander leaned back in his chair and took a sip of the high grade.

"With that bit of data, Ratchet thinks they process twice as fast as any normal Cybertronian can. Which would make a fair bit of sense when you compare that to how fast they can move when they release the blocks."

Steelbrace started at that. "What blocks?"

Taking a seat on her superior's desk, Elita smirked at him. "The blocks Shadowdancer ordered every SPARTAN functioning in an Autobot or Neutral city to utilize while not being attacked by hostile bots. The ones that limit them severely to the reaction times of a civilian bot and helps them control their less than accepting reactions in orn to orn function. They know they're dangerous, and have already taken steps to prevent any situation from arising when their military responses clash with civilian situations."

The four once guild bots winced. Blocks were one of the harshest methods of controlling oneself that they knew of. Instead of eliminating a possible reaction, the blocks would allow an action to still be presented as a possible reaction, but if a bot tried to use that action, the block would freeze up the correlating or controlling system for a specified and set amount of time. For certain types of bots and selected actions, it was comparable to offering an energon goodie and shocking a bot when they reached for it.

Steelbrace grimaced as his processor pulled up more than just a few memory files of Silentforce freezing in place for a moment before continuing on with whatever action he had been in the middle of. "I think I owe 'force an apology."

\V/

Jolt had put two and two together surprisingly fast, and as Refit led him to the hanger bay and into a rather odd looking transport ship, his processors fixated on the discussion he had with Ratchet and Wheeljack coming up to Iacon.

He was relatively sure that the SPARTANs where the ones with the Carbide ceramics making up their support struts instead of Cybertonium. The thought that the SPARTANs were using it because that was how the All-Spark made them was fascinating in its own way.

Following along almost blindly, he almost ran into the former AI's back when she stopped in a rather narrow hallway. Refit gave him a smile as she palmed open a door and led him inside. The room, and he was mildly certain it was a cargo bay, looked strange to the Cybertronian, there were half broken tanks lined up on the bay's walls, twenty five in all, and very little else. "Um, 'fit? Where are we?"

"This is the _ATHNES._ But more specifically, this is the cargo bay that held the SPARTANs while I tried to find them someplace safe six, almost seven, vorns ago."

The tan and black femme walked over to the only free spot on the wall where some jagged lengths of curved clear material. Looking closer, Jolt could match up a few of the pieces with the parts missing out of the tanks. It almost seemed as if the SPARTANs had busted themselves out of the tanks instead of waiting for some bot to let them out, making the mech give the rather thick pieces of clear material a distrustful look. Refit simply sat herself down on them before continuing.

"This is also where their conversion happened."

"Why are we…?"

"Shadowdancer has something to do in the med bay with her adoptive creation, and I'm not sure where Xenon has gotten to." Her lip plates twitched in a smile. "That, and I'm not sure about how you're going to take our bit of history."

Giving a humorless laugh, the blue mech started to wander around the bay. "How else am I to take it? It's confusing, and a little disturbing, but you're you, and that's all that really matters."

Refit gave a noncommittal hum as she watched him wander around and inspect the Cryo-Stasis chambers that had sat there unused for the last vorn.

"…well, there is this one thing." Jolt came to a halt in front of her. "You weren't a living, uh… _organic_ creature before you hit the All-Spark?"

"Not in the manner you're thinking of." She patted the spot next to her and waited until he sat down. "I was a program, an artificially created digital sentient that could think for itself. Humans made AIs like me by taking a computerized model of their own organic processors and writing over most of the data required by living organics with other programs. Normally, such an AI has a very limited life span, which was almost two stellar cycles, before they went 'rampant', where they literately thought themselves to death."

"Then how did you-"

"I was experimental. Cortana and Zero-seven-zero, or Spotter if you rather, were my creators by your race's standards and tried something that would enable me to survive past that limit. I basically was on standby for most of the time, I only started surfacing every so often after the first forty or fifty vorns to ensure the _ATHENS_ was going the right way and to deal with anything the 'dumb' AI, a program almost as complex as me without being able to free think on it's own, couldn't handle." Refit smirked a bit when it seemed like Jolt was following along alright. "Then the All-Spark hit, and I spent more and more time 'online', because there were more operational errors that needed my attention. It took a while, but I eventually went over that two stellar cycle limit just before we reached Cybertron. Why I didn't go rampant is either in thanks to the extra programming Spotter and Cortana gave me, or the All-Spark's interference."

The medic mech fell silent as he thought, and the ex-AI simply waited for the next question. "How did you end up like this?"

"Seven of the SPARTANs still deactivated due to the damage they received before Stasis during the All-Spark's conversion. I still have no idea what happened, other than the second one off-lined due to and extreme temperature flux during the time I was trying to figure out what was going on." Picking at her thigh plates, she kept her optics on the deck. "Zero-seven-six, the SPARTAN roster number of the femme that originally owned this frame, was the last one to hang on, physically at least. I have good reason to believe that her mind, her CPU, was gone or wiped even before the All-Spark hit. The physical medical report that was loaded into the _ATHENS_ with her included some severe helm trauma, and while the conversion happened the program that infected her MJOLINER systems kept referring to her system as mine."

"Ah." Jolt gave the femme next to him a long look. "Well… good. You must have been lonely with no bot around."

"I still have panic attacks when I'm alone." Refit's lip plates twisted in a small smile as she confessed. "Holdout and the other femmes don't mind when I cling to them to prevent my processors from pulling up memory files from those lonely vorns. But that was why I asked you over for so many cycles. When Hold' started seeing Sandstorm, I needed to find another bot to simply talk too."

The other medic looked around at the cargo bay, that gave him the creeps to sit in now that he knew what had happened in it, then back to the tan and black femme. "I don't mind, you really helped me out. But… um, can we go somewhere else?"

Her smile broadened to a grin as she got up. "Sure, we can go see Kynaite. He's done with his upgrade, and Zephyr is approaching the ship with him."


	17. Chapter 17

Working out a schedule of which SPARTANs and their guests needed to leave Iacon by when, Shadowdancer and Holdout posted the list in the _ATHENS_ ' rec room, where the rest of the SPARTANs were sure not to miss it.

On it were the list of which bots were due when for medical checks, whose reports still needed to be turned in to whom, and any other time sensitive notes that the SPARTANs had to deal with before they could leave Iacon.

After posting the rather small data pad near the doors of the old engineering room, the XO mused out loud on the unlikely event of being able to find a larger vid screen for such notes before leaving to confer with Nitro about something the other Praxian was worried about. Her remark made the tracker give the pad a speculative look before walking off herself, intent on finding her two Wreckers.

Being the only bots that needed either Optimus Prime or Ultra Magnus to switch around their usual duties in order to come to Iacon with the SPARTANs, Rook and Holdout corralled their respective mechs and sent them through the med bay first as they finished up their usual duties before joining them.

Neither SPARTAN femme told them what Ratchet would be looking for, only remarking that it was a usual procedure before they left.

Sandstorm got a smacking kiss from the bronze and black femme before she shoved him through the med bay's doors, ignoring her sister's snicker as she gave Impactor a backwards wave before physically pulling Rook down the hall with her.

Refit, along with Jolt and Xenon, all had to hide their smirks as Ratchet set his hands on his hip joints and glared at the triple changer. "Are you finished steaming the fragging paint off my walls?"

The Wrecker Commander gave a soft chuckle as he got out of the Praxus Enforcers' way, the other Wrecker giving the irritable medic a bland shrug. "As long as she doesn't come back, then yeah."

"What are we here for?" Bluestreak looked over his brother's door-wings curiously at the yellow medic. "Rook didn't say, and she normally tells us when we should know what she wants us to do."

"It's just a Pit-be-damned virus check." Ratchet beckoned for Refit to bring over a device similar to the one he had used on Shadowdancer's processors a cycle and a half ago. "There's another anti-virus booster going out, but since you fraggers are here, we can do this now and save some slagging time."

"That isn't very likely." Smokescreen regarded the medic suspiciously. "If that was the case, why not simply let the medics that normally handle our checks deal with it when we return?"

The Head Medic of Iacon glared at the Praxian, various curses he had made against the mech's frame set coming back to his processors with a vengeance. "Because you've been in the same slagging room as SPARTANs stationed in cities held by fragging Decepticons, and there are a few nasty, sludge coated surprises that managed to beat out their firewalls. Now then, if you process that your glitched out firewalls are better than any Pit-spawned _SPARTANs'_ , you can wait for your normal checks."

The Praxian Enforcer hesitated, but didn't leave when the yellow medic glared at him. Blaster tried to keep from snickering as he released his cassettes, but failed when the medic beckoned to the tan and black femme with a wicked smirk.

"So, 'fit. How are you with virus checks? Think you can deal with this slagger while Xen' and I work on the Wreckers?"

\V/

Nitro waited patiently as the XO read over the end of his report in her cramped office on the _ATHENS_ ' upper deck. Slouched as he was in the chair before her desk, he had a good view of Kynaite, who could now reach higher on his adoptive carrier than he could before, tinkering with the internals of her right thigh with the tools that had been concealed in the recesses in her armor plates.

"I don't remember that being a part of our training regimen on Onyx. Useful idea, but when did you start doing that?"

"When they took me for Covert Operations not too long after the augment." Shadowdancer replied absently with a slow flutter of her door-wings, skipping ahead in the report to the sections about Axel and some Enforcer femme by the designation of Roulette.

Markmaker would read it though again later more comprehensively, but the Praxian mech had expressed a specific concern to her and gave her the pad to read first. Her optic ridge rose as she read the reasoning the bounty hunter had used to explain how he knew the demolitions specialist was one of the SPARTANs.

"I take it that you believe the SPARTAN symbol is no longer safe to display where I'm at."

"That is what I was thinking. If Axel could point us out by listening for rumors of bots with the same strange symbol, then it might not be something you want emblazoned on your armor in the middle of Decepticon territory, given that the rest of us sound more Autobot inclined by those same rumors." Even if it had been vorns by Cybertronian time keeping, Nitro had once been a part of the other Praxian's training team back when they had simply been highly trained human younglings. His loyalty went more to the other class three SPARTAN than it did to the CO.

Shadowdancer, Trickflip, and Nitro had all trained to be SPARTAN-IIIs together, and where the only SPARTAN training squad left that knew what had happened to the others they had started out their SPARTAN careers with. Despite Nitro not being a part of the Covert Ops the three had still tried to keep in contact as much as they could, sometimes only for a few seconds before one or the other had been sent out again by ONI. Given the demolitions specialist's career his old Covert Ops trained team members could get away with seeing him more, under the true cover of acquiring more explosives for their next assignments, than if he had taken another job class.

The Praxian femme gave him a noncommittal hum ran the new bits of data though her battle computer and calculated the response she wanted from the Decepticons in Gygax. Even with the risk of being attacked for her sibling's actions, rather low in comparison, to the likelihood that her self-imposed, and rather lofty, objective could be reached; she shook her helm at the idea that she cover up the silver and gold SPARTAN symbol clearly displayed on her left upper arm plate. "I know what I'm doing, Nitro. Have a little faith in me."

"I do," the tan and gray Praxian mech protested, "loads of it. But that doesn't mean I still don't recall the rather spectacular times you were wrong before you got used to calculating out odds on Onyx."

When he got a sharp pair of annoyed gold optics glaring at him for that reminder, he held up his hands in defeat.

"Yes, okay. That was a fragging long time ago and before you got a battle computer to boot, but it could still happen again. Slag like that happens even to the best of us."

Shadowdancer shifted in her seat at the blurry and half remembered memory file, ignoring the squeak of angry protest that Kynaite gave her for moving without warning him.

"Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong." The XO's lip plates twisted in a rather scary looking smirk, even to her old team mate. "I _know_ , Nitro. Murphy is a fragger, but he's still usually right, even out here."

Seeing that his old team leader was still determined to carry out her plan without changing even that small detail, the demolitions specialist got up and took back his report that he was supposed to turn into the 2IC. "Well since your refusing to change even that much for the peace of processor of your old friend, if you get in trouble promise me you'll call Trick'."

"Friend? Please." The XO snorted as she turned to inspect the progress of the youngling on her thigh's inner workings. "You act more like the older brother that I never wanted. However, I will pass your warning on to Orpheus and Trick'. Now get out."

Nitro gave up and laughed as he exited the femme's office.

His loud exit caught the youngling's attention, and Kynaite looked from the open door to the warm gold optics watching his work from above. "Fuel Tasha?"

"Very well. But, my little mechling," a clawed finger joint tapped the youngling's helm, "you need to put my thigh assembly back the way it was before we go."

Shadowdancer smirked as the scraplet hurriedly replaced the tools he no longer needed away before reattaching her armor plate. It seems that some bot was in need of energy.

\V/

It was rather unusual for Warcry to be summoned to the Prime's office during working joors.

Normally, the tank framed mech would complete whatever work he had per cycle, then some more of Optimus' work dealing with the running of the numerous Autobot bases across Cybertron and then visit. The SPARTAN-Bots' CO entered cautiously, giving a short nod to the black mech lounging in one of the chairs before the Prime's desk.

Optimus gave the metallic green and black tank a quick look from the data pads piled on his desk awaiting his attention. "Warcry, I have a question."

"If this is about that virus Shadow' brought back with her, I swear I didn't know. She didn't tell me when informing me who she was bringing along from Gygax." The reactions were not what he expected.

Ironhide looked up at him sharply, since he hadn't been in the med bay with them when Ratchet explained what the XO had found the bodyguard hadn't know about that.

Simply waving a hand at the second chair in front of his desk, the Prime put away the pad he was reading and gave the wary tank his attention. "Although the thought that she knew that was affecting her processors for stellar cycles and refrained from visiting a medic is somewhat disturbing, that is not what I wanted to see you for."

"Oh… kay then," taking the seat, Warcry looked from one mech to the other, "may I ask why you wanted to see me?"

"Like I said, I have a question." The Prime gave his relaxed bodyguard a brief glance before returning his attention back to the tank. "I was under the impression that you and the other SPARTANs were simply adapting to Cybertron during this hiatus of yours. Or as Shadowdancer had put it, to regain your stabilizers. However, some of the reports you have given me the last few decacycles cycles has raised some… concerns."

"Well, not simply adapting. You're right to wonder about that." A quick smile flashed across the SPARTAN's faceplate as he realized that even if he was pretending otherwise, Ironhide was as interested in the conversation as Optimus. "One of the first rules of warfare we have been taught is to know yourself and your enemy. We've been doing some additional recon on the side, both of Cybertron as it is and the Decepticons."

"Rules 'o warfare?" The black mech straightened up in his chair, leaning towards the tank next to him. "Ah ain't ever heard 'o somethin like that."

"Well, there is a lot of it in human history." Warcry shrugged as he leaned back in his chair. "They have a lot dedicated to both the ideal warrior and various different types of war that can be waged. Like urban warfare, jungle survival, guerrilla tactics, just to name a few. Every type of war you could ever imagine, they've explored and vetted each way and the best ways to counter."

The tank mech tilted his helm to the side and gave the Prime a considering look.

"Speaking of, I've been meaning to ask you about your command staff arrangements."

Letting the SPARTAN-Bots' CO change the subject momentarily, he had a few new things to worry over now and could always ask him again later, Optimus spread his hands wide in a gesture for the military trained mech to put forward his questions and comments.

Warcry smirked at the gesture he could recall giving the Prime on more than a few occasions. "Shadow' and I were wondering who else you wanted for your unit. As it stands, you got a good working relationship with Jazz and Prowl, Special Ops and Tactical respectably, and they seem to be fitting in well, but what else are you looking for?"

"What do you mean? Those two were recommended to me by the Heads of their Divisions."

"As their respective replacements." When it seemed neither Optimus nor Ironhide were following along with his reasoning, the tank blew a sigh out of his vents. "Ether and Zeta are a part of Sentinel Prime's command staff, they took care of the work load and a lot of the orn to orn decisions for those divisions in his name. But they, along with Ultra Magnus, are all Sentinel's deputies. That's how the rest of the Autobot army sees them, and they equate them with the old Prime. Jazz and Prowl are yours, which is why there are more and more bots going to them about issues in Special Ops and Tactical rather than Ether and Zeta. It's to be expected, since you differ from your predecessor in some obvious ways."

"So… you're saying that I need my own bots." The Prime gave the SPARTAN an absent frown, thinking that chain of logic through. "Why though? Zeta, Ether, and Magnus are all effective where they are, moving them or replacing them with my own picked bots would be insulting."

"Yes and no. Insulting if you don't have someplace else to put them, but replacements are to be expected with a new Commander of any military force. You have a different style, a different method, and a different end goal than Sentinel did. Even a great difference in intent if you want to get really specific." Warcry waved a hand dismissively. "Xenon has been hinting to me that he would really like a stable assignment with just _one_ medical bay that he's responsible for, and even Zeta is starting to look forward to not having to drop everything when the Prime leaves the base they're at. All of them are nearly ancient bots, the press and drive of a well working, and that means a constantly adapting and flexible, military force is a bit much to demand of them after the many vorns they've been holding the fort for Sentinel."

"I… see." Still frowning, Optimus gazed at the SPARTAN mech before him before giving him a decisive nod. "That will require more thought, Warcry. However, I am sure you have already made some observations to that end. May I ask what it is that you're thinking of?"

"Nu-uh." Waving a finger at the Prime almost as if warning him off, the tank gave his Prime a grin. "A glorified administrator I may be, but the final decision has to be yours. You can pump me for all the information you want, but I won't tell you what to do."

Snorting in his amusement, Ironhide gave up trying to keep his laughter to himself when Optimus glared at him. "Ya gotta admit it, Prime. War' as ah administrator, glorified or not, 's fragging funny."

Sighing with a few twitches of his own lip plates, trying to keep himself from joining his bodyguard, the Prime turned back to the former alien warrior he summoned into his office. "You have more experience at this than I do. How am I supposed to make a decision if you won't tell me what the options are?"

"That's for you to decide. However many bots your staff consist of, what fields you deem important enough to need a direct commander in charge to report to you, that's all something you have to figure out." Warcry's grin had infected the black mech, and it seemed as if the leader of the Autobots as well was fighting the impulse to do more than smile. "I can give you guidelines, and what other Commanders throughout Human history have picked, but that's it."

Optimus rubbed his forehelm, wondering why it was meetings that included the two military mechs ended up with them trading quips at either each other's or their own expense. "Jazz for Special Ops, Prowl for Tactical, and I suppose I need to find a bot for Medical and Infantry as well for Xenon and Ultra Magnus. Anything else to deem necessary to comment about?"

"Internal security, some bot for the signal corps," at the other two mech's blank looks, Warcry searched his CPU for a different way describe what Spotter did for the SPARTANs, "the communications specialists that keep you informed and updated, and maybe something along the lines of problem solvers. Bots you can give a sticky situation and have them devise a way or two around said problem."

The SPARTAN tank shrugged again, running his admittedly vast experience with military outfits through his CPU for more pointers.

"You could probably keep Magnus where he is, given that the mech is probably the only really senior military bot you'll find. If you find you need any additional bots… well, you'll figure out on your own, but that might just make a good start for your own staff officers."

"Kup 's ta Security Director, War', 'n Hubcap usually has comms, least ah ways 'n Iacon." Ironhide gave the contemplating Prime a quick look to see if he had interrupted anything before turning back to the metallic green and black mech sitting next to him. "Have ya met 'em yet?"

"Can't say that I have." Warcry frowned himself as he ran though the number of bots he knew. Seeing as he normally kept to select parts of the base and avoided the more populated parts, it wasn't that unusual that he didn't meet a key bot or two. "Heard of Kup, though. As a matter of fact, Optimus here has threatened me with keeping one Kup company not too long after I met him."

"Where would I put Zeta and Ether, if I replace them with Prowl and Jazz?" Optimus wondered out loud, not expecting the tank to answer and pleasantly surprised when he did.

"Leave them here as Iacon's top base personnel." The SPARTAN's grin twisted into a smirk at the expression of the larger mech behind the desk. "They know this base better than any other bot you could find since Sentinel usually stayed either here or Central, and that will leave you more flexibility when it comes to the inevitability shifting front lines. If you don't take the commanders of one base and require them to shift around when you move your base of operations, it will go far in preventing some rather nasty snags in said base's scheduling. I'm a little surprised that Sentinel didn't figure that one out himself, but he had been a politician at one point so that isn't all too shocking."

Even the Prime had to snort at that, recalling the number of times the older Prime had irritated him by gripping the political side of the war and ignoring the realities as long as he could. "I suppose we should start with the top of this little list then. Medical… I take it you won't give me Refit if I ask nicely?"

"Nope, get your own medic." The tank kicked up his pedes on the Prime's desk, taking the hint that this may be a long meeting. "Sides, we only have Refit for our own medical concerns, and Gale' and Knight' aren't really bots you want conducting your repairs even if they do know what they're doing."

"Thought not." Optimus' lip plates twitched into a smile regardless of the insubordinate reply. "Had to ask. If I replace Xenon as the CMO and leave him here as the Head Medic of the base; do you think Ratchet could be pried loose from managing the city's medical facilities, especially if Xenon is here to watch over his responsibilities, to replace him as the Chief Medical Officer for us?"

"I don't know," Warcry grinned at the mechs, "I'm not Ratchet."

\V/

When Shadowdancer led Kynaite into the _ATHENS_ ' rec room, the youngling was fascinated by his new height and had demanded to be allowed to walk on his own in his broken speech, they were hailed by Clearsight and Rook.

Both the scout and saboteur where sitting in the middle of the room at one of the larger battered tables that had been liberated from the ruins of Kali. The red and black femme started to fuss over the youngling, getting him some regular energon she had taken from the Autobot base's rec room just for him.

Giving her superior a smirk, the gray femme led the electric blue and black Praxian right back out of the rec room. "Drax, without the rest of the trine at his back plates for the first time in what must be an entire vorn, Trick' and Orph' are waiting for us in the training room we used last cycle, ma'am."

"I trust that Clear' was a volunteer to watch my youngling, not a conscripted lackey for you?" The XO gave her best femme friend a mildly expecting look, not at all dismayed when all the other femme did was grin back at her without a hint of guilt. "Really, Rook. We need to work on your manners."

"Mm hmm. Well, if that is the case, we really need to work on your anti-social habits, seeing as you've been doing something naughty without telling the rest of us." Cybertronians didn't have lashes to flutter, but the saboteur was doing her best to pull off something close as she walked backwards to keep the XO in her sight.

Shadowdancer was hard pressed to keep the smirk off her lip plates as she elevated her olfactory sensor in a snooty expression.

"I'm not being 'naughty'. Simply selective in my approach." Her protest, if you could call it that, was offset by the wicked gleam in her gold optics as she followed in the gray femme's wake. "Besides, do you really expect anything else from me?"

Letting loose a bark of laughter, Rook grinned ruefully and shook her helm as she cycled open the training room's doors and greeted the others of the Covert Ops already in the room.

The airborne assault specialist looked decidedly uneasy without the two other seeker framed SPARTANs that were normally at his back, but the infiltrator and the assassin both simply looked up from where they were sitting on opposite sides of a very familiar clearing with scarred trees in the background.

One of them, and the XO didn't care to speculate who, had pulled up the visage of Reach again. This time centered on the wooded training grounds all of the SPARTAN-Bots present knew well; three because that was where they had been trained, and two because that was where they met up when they had what little time between missions to spare. "Any more details that need to be sorted before we begin?"

"Err, yeah. One or two," Drax rubbed the back of his helm sheepishly, "I've been picked as the new seekers' Air Commander."

He got four pairs of optics looking at him blankly for his news. Forcibly preventing his turbines from revving in irritation, the trine leader tried to clarify.

"A military type of seeker rank, as far as I know. Some sort of leader for both the Aero Space Division and the main Advisor of the civilian seekers."

"That's more than just military." The XO pointed out with a quickly stilled twitch of her door-wings. "And may I also ask what in the Pit you were thinking when you agreed to something so… well, fragging stupid?"

"It's not stupid!" The dark blue and black seeker mech glared at the officer. "It's just a… a-it's… I _hate_ you."

Shadowdancer had a smirk painting itself across her lip plates as the seeker tried to defend his new rank. "I take it it's too late to protest your new… _responsibilities?_ "

She was relatively certain of that, and more than a little annoyed at what that would mean for the quick response part of the SPARTANs' civilian defense plans, but was reasonably sure that having the seekers that highly placed in such a closed ranked frame set could only be a good thing for the Autobots in the long run.

"You knew long before you walked in this room, femme, so can we get on with this?" Orpheus was sitting next to one of the heavily scarred holographic trees, his frame leaned up against the bark and legs kicked out before him. "I really want to know what it is you've been doing in Gygax."

It was a measure of how well the Covert Ops all knew one another that the femme didn't even try to protest being interrogated over something the others could only speculate about without a scrap of proof to back their suspicions up. "Fine. As I'm sure you all already suspect, researching the Decepticon High Command, and raising Kynaite, isn't the only thing I've been doing in my assigned city."

Rook had followed her and took a seat next to where the tactician was standing, selecting to encourage an informal meeting to go along with the familiar surroundings.

"I've also been looking into other methods of either halting this little conflict before it blows up into a straight up civil war, or reducing it in strength before it gains momentum, and I think I may have a viable possibility."

Drax and Trickflip, after getting up, wandered over from where they had been; their previous positions had been taken to keep from having to listen to the assassin complain about anything and everything he thought might get a rise out of the other two mechs.

As the two took seats much like their fellow mech and saboteur, against the scored bark of some long dead trees, the infiltrator looked up at the XO and asked the query on their processors. "How? Wait… does this have anything to do with why it is you tried your clawed servos with a bar?"

"Of course. Who else would you tell your woes to if not your bartender, especially if they make it clear they don't care?" Seeing as the others had abandoned standing already, the tactician took a spot next to the other femme. "In… mediating out some of the escalations between the Decepticons that wander into my bar, it has come to my attention that there may be a method I can use to split them down the middle and divide their current strength, and possibly get the Decepticon forces to self-destruct their only chain of command."

Drax gave a low whistle as the two other mechs exchanged rather expressive looks, while Rook simply snickered. Given Shadowdancer's usual habits, well exercised skill set, and the fact this wasn't the first time any of the Covert Operatives had worked at length with the manipulative tactician, they would have been more surprised if the only thing she _had_ been doing lately was playing at being a bartender and a sparkling's nursemaid.

"Do you think you can cause this rift before all this slag blows up into an outright civil war?" Resettling himself so he could more clearly see the XO, Trickflip folded his hands behind his helm and gave his superior a searching look. "Cause as… interesting as fighting two separate factions of Decepticons or even multiple shards of the whole promises to be, I'm not all too sure about how the Autobots would take to that."

The Praxian gave him a shrug with a dismissive flick of her door-wings. "I can't tell you that at this time. I need to see if the High Command has the type of bot I need as a respectable, or at least feared, challenger to this so called _Lord_ Megatron's rule, and if said bot, assuming I can find one, is… _suggestible_ to what I have brewing in my processors."

She drew up her knee joints to her chassis and set her jaw plate on top.

"There are a lot of 'ifs' at this point without enough answers, and while I'm not comfortable sharing what it is I have planned you two, Trick', Orph', may just be called down to Gygax sometime in the next few stellar cycles. I might have need of backup if things go… south." The acid green and black mech inclined his helm to her, and after being kicked in the thigh plate by the infiltrator, the assassin did as well. "Right. Well, any other news?"

"Now that we got your little side note out of the way?" The gray femme sitting at the XO side instinctively ducked, making the elbow joint swung at her helm miss. "I've been having some surprising luck with Swindle, truth be told. He's being a down right greedy glitch about selling us information we won't be able to get in any other way, but we've established a respectable baseline for communication already and are working out a decent exchange as far as viable Intel and their credit values."

"I thought you told Warcry you were still looking for him?" Trickflip smirked at his sister, already well aware of the degree of success she had with the aptly named Swindle. "You didn't happen to lie to our commanding officer now, have you?"

Rook sniffed haughtily at the implication of her doing anything wrong, not that the others bought it for a moment. "I never lie. I haven't seen Swindle in his base metals, therefore I'm still _technically_ looking. All the communications we've… _exchanged_ , has been through leaving each other some rather twisty calling cards every few megacycles."

"I like the sound of that. What kind of twisty calling cards?" Grinning widely in the hopes of annoying the saboteur, Orpheus started cackling when she refused to comment.

That pretty much meant that the femme had to deactivate more than a few bots to get that particular Decepticon's attention, and the calling cards would most likely be the rather beaten up bots sent to deal with her.

"Do you need more credits?" Shadowdancer pointedly ignored the assassin's ill-mannered humor as she turned to look straight at her sister.

"Naw, I'm good. My ghetto dojo does surprising well for itself, even with the non-paying bum bots I teach in the late joors. What about you, Orpheus? Anything from _your_ city?" The rather icily delivered comment managed to catch the dark green and black mech's attention.

"One thing." Still with a wide grin on his faceplate, the soon to be Decepticon looked straight at the XO. "Shockwave's been spotted in Polyhex, talking to Governor Straxus and the Oil Inspector Ratbat, of all bots. Rumor has it that the scientist is mighty torqued about some unknown faction of bots that seem… disinclined to accommodate his rapidly growing curiosity over them."

"Does he realize who, or rather what, you are?" Drumming her claw tips against her thigh plate, the XO fitted that bit of info with everything else she had running though her processors.

"No. Fragger hasn't yet realized that were in more places than just Neutral or Autobot cities."

"Hmm." All four Covert Ops agents simply looked at their tactician and waited, sure in the fact that Shadowdancer would find a way to use this news to her advantage.

They didn't have to wait long for her battle computer, calibrated for both psychological warfare and battle field tactics, to devise the best way to deal with the new situation in a method that would push her own agenda forward.

"Spread a rumor he can't help but hear about my bar and the possible affiliations of the owner, and remove your upper left arm plate before you leave. We'll replace it with an unmarked one. I want him looking at or in Gygax. Do your best to suppress rumors about any seekers with the same marks."

Rook's smirk widened into a rather wicked looking grin at the decisive tone in the other femme's vocalizer. "Your turn, Drax. What else is new?"

"Lightning, for another." The newly confirmed Air Commander flicked his wing plates in confusion. "Not that I expected it, but the mech and a few of the other seekers are Decepticon aligned without being as… brutal, I suppose, as the others that share their purview."

"There are many reasons one might take up the Decepticons' rallying cry, Drax. He may simply be Decepticon through political reasons, not destructive ones. Those bots are not the ones we're working against." Shadowdancer mused, tapping one clawed digit on the ground. "Why bring this up?"

"The seekers may have stayed Neutral for a long while without outside interference. They're even more fractured over this rift between Autobot and Decepticon than most of Cybertron is right now, and are being a bit overly cautious. Problem is, that I think this indoctrination virus you caught is already present in force among the seeker frame set. There has been a rising escalation of seeker violence in Vos, and most of it either has to do with some seeker getting insulted by trivial things or attacking another bot for no real reason." He waited until the XO nodded at him, letting him know she was following along, before continuing. "I want Spotter to write up that variation you've been fomenting in your CPU, the one that will attack this virus and halt it in its tracks, and release it into Vos' seeker community."

He waited nervously as the tactician flatly stared at him. She was most likely computing the likelihood that such an act would be detrimental to their goal, and if that would constitute a greater risk than she wanted him to take. Drax didn't know what he was going to do if she said no, seeing as he was sort of responsible now for the-

"Fine. I'll give him what little I got to work from, but be warned. Whoever it was that released the virus initially will most likely be able to tell you've done something since you'll have to release the counter virus as soon as you get back for immediate results. I want a copy of the counter virus before you leave" Shadowdancer gave each of the other Covert Ops bots a long look, seeing if they had anything else to share, before getting up to her full height. "Then this meeting is dismissed. You know the drill, this never happened."

\V/

Trickflip, Orpheus, and Holdout where the first SPARTANs to leave Iacon this time around.

The infiltrator and the assassin slipped out of the base in the middle of the off-cycle quietly, only after making a few arrangements with the Special Ops to keep from getting themselves targeted by the sentries and security measures on their way out, and getting checked out by Xenon for the Decepticon virus to keep Ratchet from cursing out any of the others. The tracker left in a more convenient fashion, or as she remarked to Rook before she left: 'in a way less likely to get me shot in the aft', with the two Wrecker mechs she had brought with.

Silverbell moped around for the first few joors after she learned Trickflip had left without saying goodbye, but when Shadowdancer set Kynaite in front of her the femme youngling took to the XO's adoptive creation like a magnet takes to metal and the two had mutually decided to terrorize the rest of the SPARTANs by making some rather strange demands of the war bots while there were a good number of them about.

Said XO pointedly ignored any accusations of her intentionally supplying the two with less than acceptable ideas or requests to ask the others simply so she could see them squirm awkwardly as they tried to cope with the mostly innocent but defiantly skewed requests.

None of the SPARTANs believed her innocent claim after Kynaite and Silverbell asked Rook to tell them where sparklings came from in the middle of a meeting over the current affairs in Praxus with Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Prowl, and Smokescreen. In the younglings' defense, it was a rather impromptu meeting being held in the hallway and not somewhere they shouldn't have been in the first place, but the saboteur made some hazardous threats in her superior's direction anyways after she deftly distracted the two from their questions by inquiring if they knew if Xenon had any more energon goodies in his office.

By this point, Zephyr had given up trying to backhandedly manage the Praxian like she could sometimes do on occasion in Gygax. Shadowdancer would usually bend to the helicopter's advice in the Decepticon held city, but it seemed that if there were more than two or three SPARTANs about even the normally rather icily mannered femme had a wicked side she would only show around her cohort 'siblings'.

Case in point, the black and silver helicopter was laughing her skid platting off, and trying futilely to keep from being heard laughing her plating off, while sitting at a table with Flashfire and Ruby as Silverbell, with Kynaite standing behind her and looking shyly up at the two taller mechs, asked Sideswipe and Sunstreaker if they wouldn't mind playing 'pony' with them. They admitted after some roundabout questioning that Shadow' had said to ask them.

Not entirely sure what a 'pony' was, or even if it was safe to ask Kynaite's adoptive carrier what one was and what a game of it entailed, the silver swordmech could only inform the younglings that he had no idea how to play that, but if the two of them wanted to play anything else while they were here they had better tell him soon.

Zephyr managed to control herself as the four passed the table the three were at and left the rec room, a smirk broke out anyways when the gold twin glared at her for laughing at them. "Some orns, I really do wonder about that femme."

"Which one? The gray one, the bluish gray and black one, the black and blue, the bronze and black, the tan and black, or the red and black one?" Blinking as she thought about the SPARTAN femmes and their coloring choices, Flashfire smiled over at the helicopter as Ruby got up to follow the younglings and the metallic twins simply to keep them out of trouble. "They really like the color black, don't they?"

"Shadow' said that was more of a lack of options than any real preference for colors, but she will still look at me stupidly when I suggest she get a new paint job." Shrugging, the ex-Enforcer gave the other femme a smirk of her own. "That would be the answer to your question, though. Shadowdancer is my sponsor here. I kinda wonder what they would be like without the SPARTAN program warping how they think."

"I think it would be something similar to how they are around each other now." Flashfire mused, looking down at her half empty cube of energon as she thought back through her association with the SPARTANs. "When we first meet Trickflip in Kaon, he seemed… stiff and suspicious of me, and a little cold overall. He didn't really give Bells a second look until she took up her now favorite spot in his lap after he broke Ruby out of the Decepticons' prisoner holding cells and lead us out of the city. Then he surprised us by inviting the three of us to Praxus to live with his sister while we bounced back from having our home taken from us. Lately, Trick usually wasn't that far from Bells' side when she wasn't in the Youth Centers, simply because I think he enjoyed her presence. I'm sure if you ask the others, they'll tell you that their own SPARTAN were rather… stiff and deliberate without being outright rude until they unwound a bit from the military bearing trained into them by that UNSC thing."

"Stiff, huh?" Zephyr nodded as she remembered the hug she had given the Praxian after she had adopted the sparkling she found and requested her help in shopping for him. Shadowdancer had gone very stiff until she had released her. "That's probably putting it mildly, but a few of them are still _stiff_ even with a vorn between then and now."

Her smile twisting into a smirk, the hot pink and silver femme nodded at her black and silver table guest. "I do wonder how Rook was before Smokescreen and Blaster, and Bluestreak for that matter, started socializing her out of her military CPU protocols. From what I've seen, she's had the most direct involvement with her assigned city, and from living with the femme for the last few stellar cycles, I can tell you not much has changed over that time."

"That may not mean anything. Shadow' hasn't really changed since I met her half a vorn ago." Flicking her back blades in a shrug, the helicopter racked her memory banks for any significant changes in her employer's actions over her acquaintance with the Praxian femme. "There were some rather big things that changed, but I think that had more to do with shifting situations than any _personality_ shifts."

Flashfire opened her mouth components to comment, but shut them after a moment. "It may just be the data archivist in my programming, but I wonder if this class two or class three thing has any bearing on how they act towards others not a part of the SPARTAN unit?"

Tilting her helm to the side, Zephyr finally had to shrug in confusion. "I have absolutely no idea. Rook's a class two from what Shadow' told me, and she herself is a class three. It may just be how they are, but I'm sure your guess is better than mine."

"I'm relativity certain there is a difference between the twos and threes, but I can't figure out what." Setting her now empty cube on the table, the hot pink and silver femme got up to follow after her bonded and help keep and optic on the younglings. "For that matter, I wonder what a 'pony' is?"

The silver and black helicopter smirked at her. "I dare you to ask Shadow'."

Her response was a snort.

\V/

"Now?"

"Not yet."

Axel glared at the back of the Praxian mech as the two walked away from the well-fortified city. They had waited a cycle after the Wreckers and the tracker left before taking their own leave of the Autobot base. "How about now?"

"Nope." Fully aware of the ill thoughts directed his way from the mech walking behind him, Nitro ran through his memory core for other times he had the liberty of simply walking where he was going.

Normally, if the humans needed a SPARTAN, they got shipped faster than most could realize that they were leaving their latest location. Casting another measuring look behind them at the city walls now nearly out of visual range, the SPARTAN finally gave his companion the nod he was waiting for.

"Now."

"What the _slag_ am I supposed to do about Shockwave now? I can't tell him: 'Oh, I found them, and yeah, they kicked my aft and held me hostage for a little while. But, hey! I found out more about them than you wanted to know!'. He's not going to believe me. Frag it all, _I_ don't believe me, and _I'm_ me!"

The demolitions specialist came to a halt on the side of the road and turned back to face the irate bounty hunter. "Feel better?"

"…maybe." Crossing his arms over his chest plates, Axel glared at the mech simply staring at him. "Question still stands. Now what?"

"What do you want to do?"

The mech gave the Praxian a disgusted look. "We're not playing twenty questions, are we?"

Nitro simply stood there, and the bounty hunter threw up his hands in exasperation.

"I could go to Shockwave's contact point and tell him everything you told me, and he'll think I'm lying. That kinda eliminates that option. I can't avoid the mech, he's already proven that to me and Copper before he hired us. Which leaves whatever the frag it is you think you can do."

"What I think I can do and what happens is mostly up to you." At Axel's flat glare for sidestepping the issue again, the SPARTAN gave him an amused flutter of his door-wings. "Shadowdancer has already given me everything that Shockwave is expecting to hear from you, taken from the reports that the Decepticons already have of us. Add to that the bits and pieces that both she and Warcry approved of for propaganda purposes, and you'll be his new favorite investigator."

The bounty hunter blinked in surprise. "Really? I'm doing what… feeding them misinformation?"

Nitro shook his helm. "The information you'll be 'feeding' them will be totally true, in case it's tested against us to see how viable it is. However, we want that particular mech, and the bots that follow him, looking in a certain direction. You won't be the only bot we have putting a bug in his audio receptor, and the more 'validated' sources we have saying the same thing, the easier it is to direct his attention where we want it."

The SPARTAN waited another few moments for any other objections, but when it became apparent that he had managed to stun the mech into silence, he turned to continue walking to Simfur.

Behind the Praxian, Axel muttered a few choice comments about cracked in the processor Praxians. After a breem of running through the curses in his CPU, the bounty hunter sighed. "So, if that's the case, what do I tell Shockwave about how long it took me to get back to him?"

"Copper has already been deactivated." Giving his traveling companion a small smile over his door-wings, the SPARTAN-Bots' demolitions specialist tried not to laugh at the shocked look on the other mech's faceplate. "Holdout tracked his dead frame down after she vetted you out, the mech died hard and in pieces. As for your cover, tell him that I was hunting you constantly for the last few stellar cycles, but for some odd reason I've recently left the city. That's the reason we're _walking_ back to Simfur, so you gain all the scratches and dents hard travel would mar your frame with."

"Oh." Axel grimaced as he thought about how close he had come to sharing his doomed partner's fate. "Well… _frag_."

\V/

Rook tried to sneak up on the XO, only to get the femme's data pad smacked into her helm. "Behave."

Silverbell and Kynaite snickered at the pout the saboteur gave the Praxian femme, which was solidly ignored by Shadowdancer as she looked over the two younglings. "I hope you two have said your goodbyes, I don't believe you'll be seeing each other for a long time."

The femme youngling's smile faltered a bit as she remembered, giving the mechling next to her a sideways hug before trotting off to her carrier. Smiling up shyly at his aunt, Kynaite took the few steps that separated him from his adoptive carrier.

"I hope you had fun, scraplet." The gray femme cuffed the youngling's helm softly before giving her sister a hug that lifted the slighter Praxian off her pedes. "I'll miss you, Shadow'!"

Shadowdancer glared down at the marginally older femme holding her off the floor. "You see me nearly every megacycle through a comm line, Rook. I highly doubt you'll really miss my _oh so charming_ presence."

"Well, no. But I'll miss annoying you by proving that I'm still taller than you." Rook squeezed her younger sister once more before dropping her and flicking a salute to the SPARTAN-Bots' CO, who had just walked up to see the next group of his soldiers off. "Have fun 'War."

Warcry returned the salute, suppressing the desire to smirk at the unbalanced XO as she landed awkwardly on her pedes to avoid crashing down on her door-wings. "You're not going to miss us at all, are you?"

"No, the time away will probably only go so far in preparing me for surviving the next time we get together," Shadowdancer glared at him as she straightened, "now what the slag do you want?"

"It's about those twins we now have." Giving her a speculative look, the tank crossed his massive arms over his chest plates as the tactician pursed her lip plates and nodded for him to continue. "Why do you want them? I was under the impression that you thought they were annoying."

"Rook can be annoying, but that doesn't mean she isn't effective in what she does." Shadowdancer retorted flatly.

Said saboteur, almost as if she knew the two officers were talking about her, waved wildly at them with a smirk before transforming to her alt mode and taking off with the Praxus bots that had arrived with her and Trickflip.

"However, the Covert Ops is badly short of personnel. I'm thinking of giving you Drax, simply because having one Covert Ops trine member with two trine who are not is a little silly from a tactical standpoint. In that case, we would amount to four bots total, and while Orpheus' or my own supplemental specialties aren't really that important to the Autobots, Rook's and Trick's are."

"Assassinations and psychological warfare verses sabotage and infiltration." Warcry frowned at her. "I would think psychological warfare would be more than just a little valuable right now."

"Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how far Optimus is willing to go in keeping the whole of Cybertron in one piece." A bitter twist to her lip plates had the tank watching her warily. "Or on how much I can get away with before he finds out what I've done and objects."

"This is going to be one of those things that is going to come back and bite me in the aft, isn't it?"

"Possibly. Depends on how desperate this all gets before he finds out." Shadowdancer patted him on one heavily treaded arm as she walked off, youngling in tow. "It's always possible it's not going to be as bad as I process it will be, but better safe than sorry."

Warcry gave the back of his third in command a dark look before walking back into the base. _{Why do you want them? You haven't answered me.}_

 _{I want Silver because he shows some promise in pre-mission tactical planning. With those pranks of his, even if they were no more than minor annoyances to us, he could do some real damage if we get him trained up right and equip him out. Gold, because they are a package deal and for his ability to tolerate one-four-four's_ … _attitude. Besides, Gold will defend Silver with his spark, and Silver can actually trust Gold, which is a little unusual for us.}_

_{Where the frag do I send them first if you want them?}_

_{Ankmoor. Haven't you wondered why the scout is still here? Let zero-six-two show them the ropes of scouting and being sneaky before sending them off to one-two-seven then one-nine-six. I want Silver as a saboteur and Gold as an infiltrator. Besides, she's the oldest of us. If we are going cracked like one-nine-three is worried about when our human lives would have ended, she would be the first to go.}_

\V/

Optimus Prime carefully examined the personnel lists that the electric blue and black Praxian femme had handed to him on what looked suspiciously like one of his own data pads he kept on hand in case he needed to send off a message or two. "Any in particular you would suggest?"

The SPARTAN-Bots' XO had paid a quick visit, one that no other bot in Iacon was aware of besides the Prime and his bodyguard, to the Security Control Room for Optimus' personal benefit. Downloading the personnel files for all Autobot bases and the duties they performed under Kup's olfactory sensor without having the old mech catch on that she had ever been there. He didn't want the knowledge getting out that he was looking for more bots for his staff, and Shadowdancer was senior enough in her own unit not to care that he was looking for bots for his own.

Then again, it really didn't look like either the SPARTAN-Bots' CO or XO were willing to give up members of their unit, and Optimus was relatively certain that the unit's 2IC would follow their decisions if he asked him.

"Well, if your pressing for my _personal_ opinion," Shadowdancer drawled with a smirk, amused at the gentle probing that the Prime was giving both her and Warcry about staff officers and their responsibilities, "I would say either go yourself and look around to watch how they handle themselves and their tasks, or send a bot you trust in your place. Reports from their superiors are nice and all, but there is really no substitute for firsthand information of an individual bot's personality and habits."

Optimus gave her an old fashioned dirty look over the top of what he was now sure was one of his own data pads even as Ironhide started laughing from his usual position next to the Prime's office door. That really wasn't much help, seeing as she had handed him what amounted to the entire list of Autobots in the faction, and was now telling him to go look for himself.

She gave him a shrug with an almost automatic flap of her door-wings in return and spoke up loud enough to be heard over the bodyguard's badly concealed amusement over her last comment. "You have to do an inspection of the various bases every vorn so anyways, so it really isn't that hard to get you out of here to do a quick look over other bases' bots. Besides, you can use that time to ensure the bots you pick will work together well."

Blowing a sigh out of his vents, the Prime waved the femme off to her own errands.

"Thank you, Shadowdancer. I'll take that under advisement." He gazed at the pad for a moment, before speaking up with a question before the femme could leave. "…how did you get this?"

She turned back just far enough to see what 'this' was, and her smirk widened to a full blown grin at the sight of the data pad she had recently given him. "Rook. I gave her a little challenge to keep her out of trouble while she was with us here. Didn't think I could use it so quickly, though."

Shadowdancer wiggled her claws at the two mechs before letting the doors close behind her.

Ironhide gave another snort as the door slid shut. "Ya sure ah bout followin' their advice bout this, Prime? They're tha first ta admit they ain't tha best bots ya will ever meet."

He really had no reason to distrust the SPARTANs, but even he had met bots he would trust on a battlefield but not off it in his time in Cybertron's military before the current conflict.

"I do believe that is why they refuse to tell me straight out what to do, Ironhide." Optimus' optics fell to the datapad that had every Autobot in service listed on it. "That also might be why both Warcry and Shadowdancer are being so… oblique about this."

Warcry had been the first to draw his attention to his lack of staff officers handling the details of the different divisions for him. By what little Cybertron had for military standards, it hadn't been that long since the last Prime was deactivated, therefore very few even as highly placed as Ultra Magnus or Ether were expecting Optimus to start looking for his own officers any time soon.

By the SPARTANs' former human standards, however, he was taking way too long in getting on top of this minor issue, one that could turn into a major oversight in the face of a serious conflict forcing a confrontation with the Decepticons when ill prepared for it. He was inclined to listen more to the SPARTAN officers' advice only because they had already been in the middle of a war before, two of them in fact, and because they knew from personal experience how fast slag could move in the middle of one.

That, and the disinclination of Warcry to flatly inform Optimus that he was doing something wrong when his decisions differed from the ones the SPARTAN tank would have made in the same situation, gave the Prime a decent amount of respect for the SPARTANs' restraint as a whole unit. Yes, they had seen more warfare than either mech sitting in the office wanted to contemplate, but they didn't try to fit the conflict on Cybertron into the mold of one of the conflicts they had already seen or knew about from their own past as humans.

The number of SPARTANs the Prime had come to know decently well didn't view the current war as something like business as usual, a conflict that they were expected to step in and fix by completely destroying the opposition. The fraction of Cybertron's population was as unique a situation as it was a commonly occurring conflict for them, given the human's rather violent history, and more than a few of the SPARTANs actually sympathized with the Decepticon's position.

With another Commander in a different war, or even another bot in the Prime's place in a different part of this war, one might feel worried that his only extremely experienced and very competent unit he had was identifying too closely with the 'enemy'. As it was, Optimus was extremely grateful for that same fact.

If the SPARTANs could keep in their CPUs that Decepticons were Cybertronians as well as the Autobots, maybe this current conflict could be resolved before the civil war turned into a worldwide war with atrocities, reprisals, counter reprisals, and straight out _hatred_ consuming both sides until only deactivation would satisfy the winning side.

He could hope, at least.

"Remind me to ask Warcry if the humans ever had a war similar to this."

"Ya think he'll answer ya?"

"Possibly not." Optimus gave his bodyguard a rueful smile. "Can't hurt to ask."


	18. Chapter 18

Prowl glared at the two mechs standing in front of him, lip plates flattened to a thin line and his arms crossed over his chassis.

It was bad enough when Sideswipe didn't feel as if he had something to prove, his pranks then were merely annoying then. With the silver swordmech's miscalculation with his new unit's XO, it seemed as if he was trying to compensate that oversight by proving to her that he had the skills her unit was looking for. Which translated over into more elaborate pranks on even harder to target bots.

It was even worse when the silver twin succeeded.

Windcharger was the unfortunate bot this cycle, locked in place with what had appeared to be some type of slowly drying glue. If he had to guess, Prowl would assume that the glue like substance had been in the mech's wash rack shower head. When the unfortunate communication expert had taken his usual spin through the wash racks he coated himself with whatever compound Sideswipe had found, and his usual patterns through the base would allow for enough time to harden the glue.

As of right now, Windcharger was in the med bay, getting each and every joint thoroughly cleaned out by Xenon and Refit. Ratchet had helped him track the two down, and had just left to ensure that the unfortunate bot's misfortune didn't happen to another by retracing the communication expert's steps to find the point in which the mech had encountered Sideswipe's glue.

"Is there any particular reason why you did this?"

Stubborn silence was all that answered the tactician, the silver swordmech simply grinning back at him and the gold warrior glaring back. Prowl suppressed the desire to rub at his temples as the processor ache he had started to grow from trying to work out some kind of motive as per his old Enforcer protocols.

"Problem, Prowl?"

The Prime's tactician turned slightly to look at his SPARTAN counterpart. Shadowdancer had an inquiring look on her faceplate, gold optics flicking from one mech to the other as she approached.

"These two have locked Windcharger's joints up with some kind of glue. I must ask that you handle them," the black and white Praxian gave the twins a flat look, "however it is your unit deals with troublemakers."

"Ah." She looked from her fellow Praxian, to the twins, and back again. "Allow me to assure you this will be the last time they bother you for quite a while, Prowl. I can promise you that much."

Both brothers snapped their attention to her even as the other tactician nodded in acceptance and turned to leave. Shadowdancer, firmly suppressing her smirk, watched him until he was out of her sight before turning back to face them with an arched optic ridge.

"Err… I'm really, really, sorry?" Sideswipe tried, not entirely sure if she had gotten over the incident of him almost hitting her and her bitlit three cycles ago.

"I highly doubt that. Now come on." Shadowdancer snorted at him, then crooked a claw at them and started walking down the hall. "How much combat experience do the two of you have?"

"A fair bit." When she simply kept walking, only casting one flat glance back at them for the short reply, the silver swordmech elaborated. "I'm a practitioner of Metallikato, and we both did rounds in the gladiator rings before joining the Autobots."

She hummed as she led them into the hanger bay, and to the oddly looking transport ship where most of the SPARTAN-Bot unit gathered until they were cleared to leave. "That's not entirely good, but on the other hand, not entirely bad either… I suppose."

The ship's cargo ramp slid out, and she led the two into the old engineering room that doubled as their rec room.

"Clear', are you sure you want to be the one to do this? I could always order Rook to, even if her plate is rather full at the moment."

"Bit late to be asking, ma'am, seeing as Ro' already left." Clearsight leaned back in her chair and grinned at the XO. Her smirk faltered a bit when she spotted the two mechs behind the Praxian femme. "Sides, I'm sure I have to get over that whole 'lone scout' thing sometime, might as well be now."

"Right, well," the blue and black tactician sighed, then gestured to the red and black femme sitting at the table, "this is Clearsight, SPARTAN roster number zero-six-two, our best scout and one of our better marksbots next to Knightblade. Clear', as you probably already know, this is Sideswipe and his twin Sunstreaker, our new…. recruits."

Shadowdancer waited for the three to make the usual polite greetings before taking control of the conversation again.

"You'll be with her as she teaches you our methods, regulations, and polishes up some of your… _lesser_ used skills."

The slight hesitation in the femme's vocalizer as she switched some of the wording at the last astrosecond caught Sunstreaker's attention. "What kind of skills?"

Clearsight smirked as the XO simply stared at them. "Skills that get you in trouble for knowing."

Casting an irritated glace at the scout, the Praxian femme shrugged with a few dismissive flicks of her door-wings.

"It pretty much involves things like how to move around sensitive sensors, mostly stealth maneuvers, how to set up ambushes either alone or with a group, our sign language, our rules that guide warfare and it's accepted responses, and some other odds and ends. After Clearsight polishes you both up a bit, you'll go to Rook in Praxus for the general thieves' skills, lock picking, how to ditch a tail, and you," she used one clawed digit to poke at Sideswipe's chest plates, "will learn the saboteur's trade from her. Then you two will end up in either Kaon or Polyhex with Trickflip or Orpheus, most likely Kaon but that depends on the situation, and you," switching brothers, Shadowdancer smirked as she poked gold painted plates, "will learn either the assassin's lot or how to operate as an infiltrator."

"Can I pick?" Sunstreaker took a quick step back before the femme's claw could scratch his paint.

"No. My own or Orpheus' skills are not really needed, so unless everything goes to the Pit in a hand basket within half a vorn, you'll end up with Trickflip." She looked them both over, then grimaced at their faction decals on their chest plates. "Those will need to go. You're not trying to attract attention until after we finish training you both up, and with Praxus as a Neutral city and Kaon as Decepticon inclined, those will make you stick out like sore joints."

"Then what are we-"

Galeforce leaned into the rec room, grinning widely as he interrupted the silver swordmech. "You can leave them here, you'll need to claim rooms anyways. By the by, ma'am, I finished their replacement plates. They're in 'jack's old work room."

Sideswipe, completely nonplussed, looked from between the XO and the combat engineer. "How do you know your plates can replace-?"

"You'd be surprised at what's on the information nets that can be used for more than just reference, if you know where to look. Like the frame blueprints of certain general built bots." The gray and green mech slapped the silver mech on the back before giving both twins a backward wave as he left the room. "Have fun!"

The gold brother watched the SPARTAN mech leave, looked at his very confused brother, and then glanced at the XO still standing calmly in the middle of the room. "You plan on everything, don't you?"

"I am the tactician. Knowing how slag is going to fall, and keeping it from affecting anything important, is my job." Shadowdancer sniffed with disdain. "What where you expecting?"

"Don't bother arguing," Clearsight got up from her seat and stood next to her 'sister', "you've already lost. Shadow' doesn't do anything without knowing for certain the outcome of what she does."

"That's not true." Giving the scout her attention, the tactician frowned at her. "Why does every bot I know keep telling themselves that?"

"Face it Shadow', it's true." Patting the Praxian on the back, carefully avoiding her door-wing joints, the red and black femme smirked at the two mechs watching them. "She's been through your personnel files, any medical files that are relevant, every scrap of data that the Autobots have on you, as well as most if not all of the data that has been generated about you before you became Autobots. She probably knew how or if you'd protest before you even knew where you're going and what it entailed."

Her smirk grew to a full out grin as she turned back to face the tactician in her grasp.

"And don't bother denying it either. We know you all too well for that slag to slide."

Shadowdancer opened her mouth components to try anyways, hesitated as the scout tightened her grip on her shoulder in warning, then finally shrugged again with a huff. "True enough. But yet again, that's my job."

"Which is why we trust you to do your job." Clearsight quickly hugged the Praxian, releasing her before she could overcome her surprise, and turned back to the twins with a grin. "Now then, let's go. I do have a job to get back to."

Sideswipe looked between the femmes in confusion. "Just like that?"

The scout snorted at him. "To borrow a phrase from our XO, pretty much. You do have to lose those armor plates with your shiny Autobot decals, but you're already cleared to leave the base at any time, as long as you're with me."

She waved a red painted hand at the door.

"If you two would be so kind, let's get you squared away so we can leave already."

Following the twins out, Clearsight was stalled in the door way by Shadowdancer's quiet vocalizer. "About that other issue, Clear', you sure you don't want them to know before you get started?"

"Telling them there is a chance we will all go cracked the breem our human lives should have run out is a little stupid if I'm the one they're supposed to be learning from." Casting a quick look down the hallway as the two mildly bickered about bunk arrangements, the scout turned back to face her commanding officer squarely. "Sides, there's about what, a few stellar cycles until Knight's paranoid prediction of doom comes nigh? We can give them that much time before forcing them to worry I might start malfunctioning on them."

"I can see your reasoning," Shadowdancer allowed slowly, still frowning, "but you are going to need to warn them sometime soon to watch you for… irregular actions out of you."

Clearsight nodded once sharply. "True, but you know just as well as I do that any one of us could go first, if this is even going to happen. How are you going to handle your bots in case of the worst?"

"I have plans." The XO cracked a rueful grin at the scout's bark of laughter. "If you already knew the answer, why ask?"

"Because it's nice to hear every once and awhile." Giving the Praxian femme a backhanded wave, the other SPARTAN femme started to stroll after the twins. "It's always a good thing to know your tactician is on top of things."

Shadowdancer snorted at that, looking around the now empty rec room and running which bot was where through her processor seeing if she had anymore issues to deal with.

Titan had left late last cycle after Nitro and his bounty hunter; Quickgrip was currently hashing out an issue with Warcry before he took his own leave of the Autobot base; all but Drax of the Covert Ops team had already left, the trine and Markmaker were waiting to use the _ATHENS_ to return to Vos; Clearsight would be leaving with the twins shortly; Knightblade was waiting for Wheeljack and Perceptor to finish with their own errands before leaving; Holdout was already back in Central.

With a twist of her lip plates, the XO made for her own room on the _ATHENS_. _That leaves 'fit, 'force, Gale', and War' here, four out of eighteen solidly on the Autobots' side. With Orph' off to become a Decepticon, that would be one against four. I suppose I could count as Decepticon aligned, given what I've been doing lately, but that depends on where any further conflicts end up being fought. Which might mean two against four, in case of any fight happens to include all of us. That could be_ … _problematic._ She snorted again at her train of thought as she palmed open her door.

"Surprise!"

The Praxian femme blinked down at her adoptive creation, who had ran to stand in front of her when the door opened enough for him to see who it was. Kynaite had something purple and gold in his still small hands, and was holding it over his helm and beaming at her. Shadowdancer raised an optic ridge at an equally bemused Zephyr sitting on her berth.

The helicopter shrugged, telling the other femme that she still had no idea what the youngling had been working on even if she had watched him put it together for the last few cycles.

"Alright, let's see what this is." Shadowdancer knelt down, taking the collection of metal from her adoptive creation.

She turned it around in her claws, inspecting the vaguely familiar looking device. Hesitating for a moment, tracing the connections that were obviously not a part of whatever it had been originally, the tactician gave her youngling a searching glance before attaching it under her left forearm plate, where it seemed the small mech had intended it to go.

Kynaite tottered forward and connected the device to his carrier's systems, giving a giggle as she sharply looked at him in shock as the software installed itself. "Said surprise."

The Praxian gave him a wicked smirk. "Very well, little mech. This is well worth the… wait."

She snickered as she stood up to her full height, looking over the drastically altered Covenant point defense gauntlet.

Somehow, Kynaite had found one of the ones she had taken from the _ATHNES_ ' armory and hid in her flat in Gygax. He had reworked a lot of it until she couldn't even tell at first glance what it was.

It now fit under her armor, and looked similar to the decorative frame alterations some femmes got for themselves. Despite looking like a piece of plain jewelry, Shadowdancer could activate it just like her Covenant sword or her own shielding array. The real difference between her personal shields and this gauntlet was that the gauntlet was usable without giving away the existence her full frame shield, and it was attached to her systems without forcing her to rely on a perishable external source of power for it.

"Well?" Zephyr demanded with a grin. "The way you're smirking, I have to guess that he gave you something really good. So, what is it already?"

"A shield." Shadowdancer fluttered her door-wings, unable or unwilling to control her lip plates or her door-wings to contain her delight. "I thought he didn't recall that cycle… but apparently I was wrong."

The ex-Enforcer blinked in confusion, looking from her smirking employer to the self-satisfied youngling. "Okay, I'm lost."

The Praxian flicked her claws at her, and the helicopter moved over on the berth so she could sit down. Kynaite trotted over, squealing in approval as Shadowdancer snatched him up and sat him down in her lap with a hug. "When I found 'naite, I used my energy sword to save him from a mech that was going to deactivate him. I haven't used it much since, except in places I know for a fact he wasn't there to see, but he recalled it and built me a shield to go along with my sword."

"You have a sword? Why haven't I seen it?"

Shadowdancer's smirk finally widened into a full blown grin. "Cause there wasn't a need for it. I haven't _had_ to kill any bot since that cycle."

"Had?"

Zephyr was about to ask another few questions, her Enforcer programming insisting that meant the Praxian before her had done something she should at the very least be arrested for, but the helicopter firmly smashed that part of her programming down. She flicked her optics to the ceiling for a moment as she struggled with her programming, then down to glare at her employer.

"You're baiting me on purpose."

"Course I am." The femme shrugged with one shoulder, the other supporting her youngling as he decided to investigate her door-wings and their joints since they were so conveniently close at hand. "Slag is going to get just that much warmer with the bots that know SPARTANs, and I'm no exception. Now that Optimus is no longer concerned with our 'blending in' without killing masses of bots, we can operate just a bit more aggressively than we have been."

Shadowdancer pressed her lip plates together as she inspected the helicopter across from her.

"That also means slag is going to get hot with where we are, so I need to know if you can ignore your old programming and keep faith in me."

The former Enforcer crossed her arms over her cockpit. "And you process that now is a good time to ask me?"

"I may end up killing a lot of bots." The SPARTAN-Bots' XO grinned as the helicopter before her twitched. "Lots and lots of them before this is over."

"Is that a warning or a threat?" Zephyr shuddered, back blades twitching compulsively as she glowered at her smirking friend. "Sounds a bit of both from where I'm sitting."

"It _is_ a bit of both."

\V/

"You sure about this?"

"Mostly. I haven't gone out of my way to confirm anything, but from what I've seen so far…"

Warcry grunted, still frowning at the close-quarters combat specialist's data pad, the one that contained his report of the vorn stint in Yuss as a data courier. "That… _this_ could be a very bad thing."

Quickgrip smirked at the tank's probably unintentional parody of their saboteur. "Yes, so I wanted to know what I can do about this."

"Nothing at first." The CO responded absently, looking over the bits and pieces the other SPARTAN had compiled over the last half a vorn about one mech in particular. "Even before Shadow' gets a look at this, and I strongly advise you to have her look this over, I can already tell you she's going to tell you that you can't simply jump in pedes first with something like this."

"I could have told you that, given how… flighty the mech seems to be." Snorting, he waited a moment before trying again. "I meant, if I'm allowed to interfere the next time I spot this happening."

"I don't see why not." The metallic green and black tank gave the other SPARTAN a nod as he handed back the data pad. "From what happened the last time, I don't think he would argue. Might even start searching you out when this slag happens."

Quickgrip gave a short laugh at that. "I'm sure Shadow' can give me the exact percentage of the likelihood that will happen, sir."

Warcry shook his helm bemusedly. "What I don't get is why the Decepticons are after your Blurr mech in the first place. What worth have they pinned on some Neutral data courier bot? This almost doesn't make any sense."

"I beg your pardon, Warcry." Both SPARTANs sharply looked to the open office door, where Prowl stood in the hallway looking in, seemingly stalled from passing the door from the topic of the mechs' conversation. "But did you say _Blurr?_ "

The two mechs in the office shared a quick glance, but the close-quarters combat specialist shrugged and handed over his data pad. "Yeah. He's a mech I sort of know in Yuss, that's been getting some pointed, and rather abusive, attention from some Deceptions there."

The Autobots' tactician nodded sharply as he quickly read over the portion of the report that the SPARTAN mechs were discussing. "Blurr is used by the Autobots when we need a secure way to transmit sensitive data over long distances."

"Oh." Quickgrip slapped a hand against his helm. "Frag it all, I should have thought of that."

"Slag that, Quick'." Warcry took the pad back from the black and white Praxian mech in his doorway. "We're not Shadow', able to devise the correct reasons from some bot's unconscious actions. We have to do this the normal way."

The SPARTAN-Bots' CO frowned a bit harder at the pad, almost as if he was going to blame it for not seeing the reasons despite his own words.

"Sides, Blurr's not an Autobot, and he wasn't wearing a fragging sign that said: 'Autobot supporter, please help me'."

The other SPARTAN mech snorted a self-depreciating laugh even as Prowl nodded in agreement. "We advised him to remain Neutral for his own protection, but if the Decepticons have already surmised the reasons he has been spotted around so may Autobot bases, then that protection is no longer a factor."

The close-quarters combat specialist rubbed the back of his neck supports. "Well then, Prowl, do you have anything I can use to keep Blurr from thinking I'm some sort of Decepticon plot to gain his confidence?"

"There are a set of codes that will identify you as another Autobot supporter, I can give you those." The Praxian mech tilted his helm to the slate gray and black mech, before his blue optics slid to the data pad that Warcry still held. "If I may, can I request to look over the reports you have from your soldiers?"

"We're going to turn them into the Prime's care anyways, Prowl. So ask Optimus to look them over." The tank hoisted himself up from the chair and gestured to the mechs to clear out of the way. "Give Quick' those codes while I keep Shadow' from leaving, she's supposed to be leaving at the end of this joor and I want her to look this over before she goes."

\V/

Unlike the first time the SPARTAN-Bots left Iacon for other cities, it only took the heavily fortified Autobot base city a few cycles to adjust to the lack of SPARTANs in its vicinity. Like the last time, it took the sound of the _ATHENS_ taking off to alert the population that most of the odd bots had already left.

The fifth time some random bot had snuck into the med bay, despite Ratchet's usual rough dealings with bots who had no business in his bay, and asked Refit if she was indeed staying in Iacon instead of leaving for another city after any amount of time Jolt screwed up the courage to ask why.

The tan and black femme shrugged, looking a little lost herself as she blinked at him innocently. "I have no idea. It really is strange, now that I think about it. I mean… I would understand if it was Knightblade or even Shadowdancer that they were asking about, they both are obvious assets to any military organization, but why it is that they want to know if I'm staying here _is_ a bit odd."

To the brightly painted blue mech's horror, she then proceeded to track down and ask Ratchet why it was.

"I think I fragging know," grumbled the Head Medic of Iacon, giving the two junior medics his attention instead of the medical supplies and replacement parts he was inventorying at the moment.

He was more than a little annoyed that so many bots were bothering his apprentice with such a trivial question, and that it took her bringing it to his attention for him to notice the disruption.

"Think about it 'fit. Who else would the rest of your slagged up unit come back for in case the worst happens? Warcry is obviously able to take care of himself, same goes with the other two glitched up SPARTANs we got kicking around so far. You, aside from that scrap of metal Shadow' adopted, are the only bots so far that your SPARTANs would raise the _Pit_ out of Unicron's grasp for without question." Ratchet paused, then snorted back a bark of laughter before continuing. "Well, you, that youngling, that fragging Wrecker mech of Holdout's, and _maybe_ one or two others the SPARTANs slagging brought with them."

Refit tilted her helm to the side, then asked a question that almost stalled both mechs. "I'm a _hostage_?"

"No, 'fit. You're not a hostage." The amused tenor tone drew all three medics' attention to the medical storage bay's doors, where a silver seeker lounged with a smirk. "Your more like a tangible reminder for other bots that we're coming back every once in a while."

"Spotter!" Abandoning the conversation with the other medics, the slighter femme ran to the seeker and hugged him. "I thought the _ATHENS_ had already left. What are you still doing here?"

The recon scout gave a grin and a shrug in reply, slinging an arm over what was technically his creation and steering her back over to where the two other mechs were standing. "The _ATHENS_ _did_ leave, Drax is going to hide it away near Vos, but not with the seeker council this time. Tigerstripe left with Hailstorm and Lightning about a joor ago, too."

"So what are you doing here instead of with the rest of your trine?" The SPARTAN-Bots' medic asked, thrilled that her sort of creator had decided to visit her before he left. "I would have thought you would have stuck with them for the long trip back to Vos."

"I found something that belongs to you, and thought you might like it back." Spotter held up his hand, clenched around something the medics couldn't see, and tipped it into the ex-AI's hands.

Refit blinked at the small cube of circuitry in her palm. "This… was my AI cube."

The seeker mech released her and leaned up against one of the crates holding surplus parts in order to face her. "Pried it out of Navigation late last cycle. I don't think any of us really thought about finding it, since you're now as mobile as the rest of us, and I really don't have a clue about what's on it right now. Thought you may like to have a say in what is done with it."

Rolling over the compact digital storage device used by UNSC AIs, the medic femme stared at it as she thought over how close she came to living in it for the rest of her function.

"Wait a tick," Ratchet looked from one SPARTAN to the other, then at the block that his apprentice was holding, "you mean to tell me _that_ fragging bit of metal was 'fit?"

"Well, yeah." Rubbing the back of his neck cables, Spotter shot the older medic a rueful grin. "That was what I loaded up the AI construct we designated Refit on when Cortana and I finished programming her. All of about… sixty or so vorns ago."

Refit gave her creator a dry look, still rolling the cube around in her hand. "Sixty four and some. Are you trying to avoid thinking about how ancient you are, Spot'?"

The seeker gave a turbine rev at the dig, frowning back at her playfully. "I'm not ancient. For frag's sake, I've only seen barely over a vorn of function all total. You're not that far behind me either, 'fit."

Her lip plates twitched up, his wing plates flicked, and both ignored the rather shocked look the junior medic gave the Head Medic of Iacon. "They're _how_ old?"

"It's not polite to ask a femme their age, Jolt." The former AI shot over her shoulder as she grinned at her creator.

"And that's my cue to leave." Spotter gave his creation another brief hug before giving the medic mechs a backhanded wave as he made for the door at a fast clip.

Ratchet sighed, rubbing the bridge of his olfactory sensor as his apprentice smiled innocently, still fiddling with the cube of circuitry in her hand, while Jolt looked from student to teacher with something too close to panic on his face plate for the older medic's liking.

A rather awkward moment passed in silence, and then the older mech's helm snapped up and pinned the younger with a glare as his processors devised a way to redirect the conversation out of the potentially hazardous minefield it had wandered into before the blue mech could ask another question. "Aren't you supposed to be going back to fragging Central soon?"

"Xenon asked me to stay on for a little while before going back, he didn't say why." The younger mech shifted his gaze from one to the other. "Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?"

Refit turned her innocent smile on him. "Depends, do you want the age that I have all total, even stasis locked, or the one of how long I've been functioning in any capacity at all?"

Jolt blinked at her. "There's a difference?"

"All together, I'm sixty four vorns and three stellar cycles old, and counting." Still smiling her innocent smile, which neither of the medic mechs really believed on sight at this point in their association with the SPARTAN-Bots as a whole, the ex-AI pretended to compute out the other number. "I've been functioning…? Oh, I'd say about… hmm… ah, nine stellar cycles, about half a decacycle, and counting." She gave both mechs a sharp nod as they shared a long look.

"Forget I asked." Rubbing a hand over his faceplate, the brightly painted blue mech moved the entire conversation to the very back of his CPU to panic over later, when he wasn't supposed to be working.

Ratchet gave him a laugh devoid of humor. "Welcome to my fragging function."

\V/

Waving idly as Bluestreak and Smokescreen trudged off to their living flat; Rook suppressed the desire to smirk wickedly as the Enforcer cast one last suspicious glance back at her before following his brother.

Smokey had wanted to escort her back to her dojo, probably in an attempt to ask her some pointed questions that Blue wouldn't like to hear, but she had demurred and asked for some time for herself before meeting up with them all again at one of their favorite bars.

Blaster and his cassettes had already left for their room in the Enforcers' barracks half a joor ago. Flashfire, Ruby, and Silverbell had taken their leave once the group had reached the city, the two creators telling the SPARTAN femme that they would be back a little later in the cycle to pick up their personal effects before her dojo.

The walk home was a bit unusual for the gray femme, seeing as for the last megacycle she had been surrounded nearly constantly by other bots and now she finally had time to listen to her own thoughts.

 _Not that I mind_ , she mused with a wry sense of amusement threading itself through her CPU, _it's sort of_ … _nice not to be the stranger in a close knit group for once._

Still thinking about how the last megacycle had passed, from Refit's graduation to the last drive back to Praxus, she almost made an amateur mistake and came to a halt in the middle of the road as it became apparent that some bot was waiting in her ghetto looking dojo.

The SPARTAN gave the small traps she had set up before leaving a quick look over, without moving her helm too far in any direction. None of them were set with the intention of stopping any bot trying to get in, they had been set simply to alert her if some bot tried while she was gone.

There was the thin wire she had set across the main doors, that was still intact. The painted lines of artwork on the windows spaced around the main floor and their frames were no longer aligned on the far back left side of the warehouse, meaning whichever bot, or bots, was in her dojo had used the window to enter. The faint sensation of being watched, never a good thing for those in her line of work, cemented in her processors that whoever had been in her dojo was still there.

Keeping an outward appearance of a bot who thought nothing was wrong, Rook calmly strolled to her main doors, thanking every lucky star she had that the other femmes were cleaning up their new living unit issue instead of coming straight back to the warehouse with her and she managed to deflect Smokescreen from coming home with her.

Before she had even approached Bluestreak about buying the warehouse, the saboteur had thoroughly investigated the structure and all of the blind spots that it had. The instant she passed under the lip of the warehouse's second story, any bot watching from the upper level would be unable to see her. It was unlikely that whoever it was in her dojo was waiting for her on the main floor, as the floor length windows provided no place for even a mini-bot to hide from bots passing by on the streets.

She waited until she reached for the digital lock on the door to activate her stealth system, noting with dry amusement as the hand she reached out for the lock wavered in her sight before blending in with her surroundings. Flicking off the silent security system, that told her the same thing as her window paint did, the saboteur opened the door enough to slide through before closing it behind her slowly, listening for any movement or sounds from the old structure to betray the location of her visitor or visitors.

A few creaks and groans she identified as part of the building settling a bit more firmly on its base were all that she could pick up, giving the saboteur a grudging respect for the patience of whoever it was waiting for her. Still, in her job class, it paid well to be cautious when there were unknowns around, and Rook started to make her slow way across the main floor while keeping an optic on the second level in case her visitor wanted an early glimpse of her.

Eschewing the staircase all together, there were a few steps that would creak regardless of what she did to mitigate the total weight coming down on them, the SPARTAN femme took a running jump for the balcony of the sky walk that made up the pathways for her second level. Swinging herself up, she paused in a crouch to see if any bot heard the faint clangs of metal on metal from her running, gripping the rails, and pulling herself up.

A few whispers of metal drawn across a synthetic surface drew her attention to what had turned out to be a study in the last few stellar cycles, a spot that both Flashfire, and Ruby had used to unwind in after work. To the once human SPARTAN, it seemed to be more like one of the few human style living rooms she had seen on her sabotaging and spying jobs for ONI, but she went with the Cybertronian femme in what they wanted to term it as.

"When the frag is this femme supposed to get back?" High pitched and winy, Rook already didn't like whoever it was behind that vocalizer. Mech number one had hissed his question to another bot she couldn't see, a few dragging steps alerted her to his pacing on the rug Ruby had bought her back when the femmes had just moved in with Trickflip after fleeing Kaon.

"Relax. She's most likely already here," another mech, farther back in the room than mech number one, "probably somewhere nearby just watching us. The lookout at the gate said she and that posse of Enforcers and femmes she hangs out with just returned a joor ago, and if I wasn't mistaken that gray femme you spotted out the window was her."

Rook diverted to the room next to the study, where she could use the previous nature of the building to her advantage, still listening in on her uninvited guests. In remodeling the warehouse into something that she could live in, she had to leave gaps between the ceiling of the rooms, the tops of the walls, and the roof.

She hoisted herself up on what had been Trick's berth before he left, idly wondering who it was that was the 'lookout' mentioned. Whoever it was, she missed him or her entirely and skills like that were hard to come by naturally without hard training for it.

Unlike the rooms that had turned out to be personal rooms, there were six in all on the second floor of the warehouse, the common rooms did not have ceilings keeping the sight of the roof hidden.

Either or would not have bothered the saboteur, but that fact meant she only had to risk moving one ceiling panel out of her way to _investigate_ her guests.

(ooo000ooo)

Jackknife scowled at his so called partner for this little errand, who was still pacing near the windows and glaring down at the street as if he could summon up the strange femme they had been sent to interview by merit of his disgust alone.

Why it was his crime lord wanted _this_ femme on his payroll was more than a little beyond the impatient petty thief, and he wasn't afraid to tell the underground enforcer with him what he thought of the situation that lead to them working together.

"At least her set up isn't so bad." Grit scuffed at the rather expensive looking red and purple rug underpede again, causing Jackknife to grit his dental plates in irritation.

The red and gold painted mech sitting on the couch rubbed a hand down his faceplate, adding his mental will to the thief's disgust in summoning that femme. "At the very least, can you stop messing with her stuff? She's not going to be too happy with us if you keep leaving marks all over her home."

The slighter light green thief threw up his hands at the much larger fighter he had been ordered to bring along for protection. "Like she's here to complain! I'm not making noise, like you said; I'm not poking around, like you said; so what else can I do to pass the time?"

"You can drop dead. I've found that that's always an option." Grit had enough time to stiffen at the feminine vocalizer hissing in his audios, before the muzzle of some type of gun pressed into the back of his helm and froze up his joints. "And you really should listen to your friend over there. I'm not happy at the moment. That rug was a gift from a friend."

Jackknife jerked upright to confront the femme that gotten the drop on him, and gaped at what he saw… or rather, didn't see.

"Uh… Rook?" The thieves' enforcer asked, surprised when his own vocalizer didn't waver from his internal shock. It wasn't every orn you saw what looked like a shotgun pointed at the back of your so called partner's helm without the bot behind it being visible.

"That would be me." Agreed the vocalizer from nowhere. "Care to explain yourselves before I aerate your little friend's CPU?"

"He's not my friend." Holding up his hands in a gesture of peace, Jackknife was again startled by the wavering, shimmering _something_ that flickered into view behind that steady shotgun.

He tried to keep the nervous tone out of his vocalizer as the femme snapped back into visibility and glared at him with her odd orange optics.

"I… ah, we're sent by Goldbolt, he wants you-"

"Don't care, _get out_." Grit squealed as he was prodded rather roughly by the muzzle at the back of his helm sending him over to his larger partner. The thief decided this was a situation for roughs, not thieves, and dove for cover behind the mech his boss had sent with him.

The thieves' enforcer hesitated, trying desperately to find a way to keep the femme from killing them both or kicking them out. He had never failed his employers before, and from the looks of it, this might be the first time. "Look Rook, I know you're not too happy with us at the moment, but would you please-"

"I already know." The gray femme subspaced her shotgun and crossed her arms over her chest plates, drawing Jackknife's attention to the gold and silver symbol on her left arm armor plate, staring at the two intruders in her study with a neutral expression. "He wants me to become a thief again. Not interested, so you can tell him to stick his offer where the starlight won't ever reach."

"Look, you uppity femme," Grit bit out from his supposedly safe location behind the thieves enforcer, "either you take the offer or Goldbolt will destroy your little operation here."

To both mech's shock, she started to laugh.

"D-destroy… my… wow." The femme shook her helm with a few more snickers, a smirk growing on her faceplate. "You really don't know what you're dealing with, do you? Very well, allow me to prove your little threats don't bother me."

With that, she gave both mechs a slight mocking bow, before disappearing again.

At least, that's what it seemed like.

Another squeal from Grit made Jackknife whirl around, only to be confronted by the sight of the Rook femme pinning the thief against the far wall with one hand, three feet off the ground. The thieves' enforcer hadn't even seen the femme move, didn't realize that any bot could move that fast without anything betraying their movement, and was gaping much like he had only a few moments earlier when she appeared out of nowhere.

She leaned in close to the thief, a smirk still on her faceplate. With her holding him up like she was, the thief had the unusual experience in looking at a bot in the optics. "You can try to damage me or my 'little operation' here, but that would only mean you and your employer are asking for a quick deactivation."

Ignoring the slighter mech's wiggles, Grit was trying and failing to get out of her grip, the femme took a step back, still supporting the thief with only one arm.

"I know the thieves trade inside and out, knew it since I was a sparkling on the streets. There is nothing you can tell me to make me change my CPU about becoming one again."

Giving the red and gold mech behind her a curious glance, Rook took a few strides to the door of the study and dropped the slighter mech on the floor.

"Now then, I'm only going to say this once more before I decide it would be easier to simply get energon stains out of my rug. _Get out."_

Grit didn't even look back once as he bolted for the door, and both bots in the study listened to him crash into the dojo's main door before getting it open and running out.

"Not too much in the way of smarts." The femme commented almost offhandedly, as if she hadn't just threatened violence an astrosecond ago.

"No, but he is one of the better thieves Goldbolt has." Jackknife agreed cautiously, watching the femme out of the corner of his optics. "Your method was a bit crude, but you do know that what he said was the truth, right?"

"What? That this Goldbolt mech is going to harm me and mine?" Strolling over to the chair across from the one the thieves' enforcer had taken before her arrival, Rook slumped down in it with a wry laugh. "I wasn't joking either. I'm allowed to use lethal force if attacked."

That raised more questions than it answered.

"So… Enforcer?" Jackknife tried as he reclaimed his seat, hoping that this femme wasn't feeling mechicidal and he could get a few answers.

"Nope." The gray femme, and now the mech was close enough to see that she wasn't simply straight gray, half of her paint was metallic and reflected the dim light coming through the floor length windows of the study in a fascinating pattern, smirked at him for the feeble guess. "Could you really imagine an Enforcer acting the way I do?"

"Well… no, not really." The mech replied, confused beyond belief.

He was relativity certain that any attempt to match wits with this femme would only end badly for him, and decided to cut to the chase. She probably already knew all about him, and what he wanted anyways.

"I'm here because some… _individuals_ we both know of are getting a little… _concerned_ by what you've been doing here since you arrived." Trying hard to not to smile weakly at the raised optic ridges she gave him for his choice of vocabulary, Jackknife plowed on without pause. "I was given over for Goldbolt's purpose only because he was going to try something so spectacularly stupid, and the rest of those… _individuals_ didn't want your attention fixating on them."

Rook twisted her lip plates as she stared at him, swinging one pede idly and obviously waiting for him to continue. When he didn't, he simply laced his finger joints and stared back, the SPARTAN saboteur had to give him credit for not flinching away when it was obvious that he had been tossed helm first into the Pit as a gauge for how violent she would get from outside interference.

"From what I understand," she started slowly, keeping her orange optics on the red and gold mech across from her, "the slums are not part of the underground as a district territory under a Thief Lord at all. It's supposed to be neutral ground for deals to be carried out in, and a safe place for hideouts when needed. That was the reasoning that I got when I scouted out the city's general feel."

Jackknife shifted uncomfortably. "Well… yeah, that's how it's supposed to be."

"And Goldbolt is blatantly ignoring that by setting up shop in the slums and trying to carve himself out a few slices of the other… _individuals_ ' territory, yes?"

"Yes… but-"

"Therefore, you and your… _employers_ have no reason to object with what I've been doing." Rook gave him a sharp smile, this one devoid of any amusement or warmth. "Meaning that if they interfere with what I'm doing, I'll turn on them. My intent is not to usurp any one of them and take over using force, I'm just doing my job."

The mech opened his mouth components to object automatically, and shut them with a snap as the full meaning of her words sank home in his CPU. He leaned back a bit, setting his spinal column against the back of the couch he was sitting on, and frowned at the femme before him. "Are you trying to tell me you're not interested in gaining a hold on the city for your Enforcer friends?"

She snorted, the hard edges set in her faceplate melted into unabashed amusement, and she waved a hand dismissively. "Smokey wouldn't like it if I went back to being a thief, even if it was for his benefit. You don't have to worry about that."

"So… you have no designs on the underground power bases of Praxus, your just training what amounts to a small army out of slum dwellers and bum bots out of the goodness of your spark." He sneered at her, trying to make sense out of the femme's motivations with the contracting self-image she portrayed. "You must be really low in energy to think I'll buy that slag."

Rook merely smirked back at him. "Not out of the goodness of my spark, no. I'm a soldier, first and foremost, and my orders are clear. ' _Defend the city at all costs while your assigned to live there_ ', as my superior put it about a vorn ago. _My_ spark isn't what I'm worried about."

He gaped at her, and she laughed again.

"My 'army', as you call it, is only going to be used in an emergency. The Enforcers' don't realize what I'm doing, and I would like to keep it that way for as long as I can. So, if that's all your here for… I'm sure you know the way out. I'm expecting company in a few breems."

Still grinning at him, she sank back further into her chair, if possible her insolent posture became more so as she waited for him to leave.

"You… you're… _what!_ " Jackknife bolted to his pedes, something very close to panic twisting his faceplate.

"Expecting company," the saboteur repeated slowly with a wicked smirk on her lip plates, purposely omitting what he was really asking about, "a few femme friends of mine and their creation that have only recently moved out. And a few Enforcers, a merchant, and a gaggle of cassettes."

Rook pressed a finger joint to her lip plates in thought.

"They should all be here in… oh, I want to say about half a joor at the latest. We're going out for a few rounds at this cute little bar out near the merchant district's Enforcer Station."

Almost against his will, the red and gold mech started to laugh a bit hysterically as he collapsed back into his seat. "Just… _Primus,_ femme! You got some titanium laced bolts in that frame, trying to pass that off as motive, that's for sure."

He shook his helm ruefully, chagrined that he had almost believed this femme at her word.

"What are you really doing? Tell me and I would be happy to get out of your wires."

"Hang around a while and find out for yourself." Rook suggested calmly. She knew he wouldn't believe her, even if what she said was the plain truth. As Shadowdancer coached her before she left Iacon the first time, hiding the truth in plain sight was easier than trying to keep something the size of an army a secret. "Unless you're afraid of a pair of off-duty _Enforcers_ …"

"I ain't afraid of slag." The mech shot back gruffly. Jackknife grimaced after a moment of glaring down at the gray femme, shifting his attention to the windows and the rather spectacular view they provided of the city. "How would you explain my presence to your goody-goody toy mechs?"

Rook gave him a grin he was almost positive was evil.

"Not even Blue has been to all of my self-defense classes so far. We can say you're the senior student of one of them, and you came by to ask me a question." She jumped to her pedes, still grinning at him. "Is that a yes?"

The thieves' enforcer spent a moment to curse out the situation in the safety of his processors before nodding grudgingly at her.

"Perfect, now go answer the door while I rinse off the dust of travel." She patted his shoulder and was out of the room before he could react.

Jackknife blinked after her, twitching when some bot knocked on the front door of the dojo and called out in a femme's vocalizer, "Rook? You still in?"

\V/

"Perfect." Trickflip muttered to himself as he used a bit of shattered metal to check what was around the corner of some ruined building, lip plates flattening at the sight of another Decepticon patrol lounging around a bit father down this street too.

That made three patrols in strength greater than five bots since he entered Kaon's regional territory, and he wasn't even close to the little hidden bolt hole he had set up for his return before retreating with Flashfire, Ruby, and Silverbell. That was on the very outer edge of the city, and he could just see the start of Kaon's merchant district on the horizon.

Where in the Pits the Decepticons were getting all their bots, the infiltrator didn't know, but it was getting annoying as slag to deal with. The more there were, the more likely that even he would trip up and alert some bot that he was here again. He could risk using his stealth systems, but the level of ambient brightness at the moment would make him more of a very odd looking blurry mess than usual, and far easier to spot than he liked. Which left…

He looked down at the grating at his pedes with a grimace. His first exploration of the underground regions of Cybertron had been with Shadowdancer, and the two of them had only been interested in the immediate level below the streets of Gygax.

That bit of reconnaissance had been relativity painless, just a simple matter of mapping out the first sub level of the city they found. His next jaunts into the shadowy world under the crust of Cybertron had gone a good bit farther than that, and was enough to make it almost as bad as fighting the Flood back in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Pure curiosity had driven him to scout out the underground during the cycles when the surface dwelling Decepticons were intent on hunting him down. Five levels under the city, the SPARTAN had run into what the minibots he had met down there called 'Mutants' in disparaging tones.

Needless to say, they were less than friendly to the small group of three minibots and the lone SPARTAN-Bot mech, and the entire incident ended with four deactivated Mutants and a passel of impressed minibots.

Dune Runner, Iceberg, and Ransack, the team of minibots he met by chance, had advised him to avoid going any deeper after that incident; but about roughly half a stellar cycle before Flashfire would ask him to save Ruby, Trickflip had gotten bored with playing tag with the Cons and tried to see what was below those five levels by using his stealth systems.

He had gotten pass the Mutants easily enough, dark or not underground the non-transforming residents of the underground still used lights to see instead of something less obvious, like how the spider-bots used sonar to keep themselves out of the way.

However, under the levels they inhabited was something a bit creepier than two fractions of the Cybertronian race bent on the total destruction of each other.

The farther one got the more the tunnels had turned from obviously uniformed carved walls from some ancient digger bot to the uneven surfaces of natural caves, somewhere between the tenth or eleventh level down, and the farther a bot got from there the less ventilation there was to keep moisture that could rust even medical grade steel from building up.

The wet dark hadn't bothered the infiltrator, it was the underground denizens even farther down that did. The twisted, stunted creatures stumbling around in the moist gloom that far under Cybertron had spooked the spark out of Trickflip. Still did, even.

He hadn't gotten a good look at them when he spotted them, not wanting to risk disturbing something he shouldn't have, and backtracked the instant he registered that he wasn't alone down there. The next time he had run into Ransack's team of Mutant hunters, he had asked the minibot about the shambling, twisted, organic seeming creatures even father below the surface.

"They're called Demons," the sea green minibot had informed him, standing on a bolder so he didn't have to crane his neck cables at an awkward angle to look the larger mech in the optics even if he was kneeling down to talk to them, "what they are is a little beyond me, but my work orders call for me to fight them like we do the Mutants."

"Nasty pieces of work," groused Dune Runner without looking up from his work, "can take the energy from weapon's fire and simply absorb it until they burst. They can also eat a bot's spark, so be careful the next time you're poking around down here without us."

Trickflip assumed the light tan mech's current unhappy attitude had to do with either the near frigid temperatures this piece of the underground saw or his almost disassembled left leg assembly and not with his habit of wandering around in their stomping grounds.

In contrast, the last minibot, painted bright red and absolutely ecstatic about the frigid temperatures, was bouncing on his pedes as he inspecting the frost that had accrued this far beneath the surface with satisfaction.

"There are two differentiating theories about how they came to be." Iceberg turned his green optics to him, growing serious at the topic of the conversation. "Whichever one you go with, they still are incredibly dangerous, and you were lucky you got out when you did."

Dune Runner got to his pedes with a snort at the acid green and black mech's skeptical expression, flexing the leg he had just finished repaired. "Either they were here before Primus started to create us, or he created them at the same time as the originals, but each story has ended with them getting locked away down here cause they're crazier than bots running on syk and razon oil."

Now blinking at the grate at his pedes, Trickflip risked another look at the Decepticon patrol lazing about down the next street before stooping to pry the rusty metal out of it's moorings with a minimum of groaning metal. As he dropped into the dim lower levels of Cybertron, the infiltrator wondered how his minibot acquaintances were doing with the unrest expanding above their helms.

Instead of risking another fight with any Mutants he wandered across, the SPARTAN mech activated his stealth systems, more confident of their effects in the murky darkness down here than on the brighter surface. He didn't intend to go that far beneath the surface level, but most minibots used the higher levels as a safe method of travel when not actively hunting, and some ambitious Mutants have been known to try following them to the surface when they felt especially mean.

Two breems of silent traveling without spotting even a glitch-mouse, and the infiltrator found a different team of three minibots resting after their latest jaunt below. A cube of mid-grade was bartered with the team leader, Ascentor, earned him the news that Ransack's team had been requested for some problem in the minibot city.

Which was news to Trickflip, seeing as the SPARTAN didn't know the minibots _had_ their own cities.

"Thanks." He told the yellow minibot, getting a nod in return as the three started off back to the lower levels to complete their orn's work.

Getting back to his pedes, he was never comfortable in making the short stature bots have to strain to look at him, the infiltrator started to plot a way through the well mapped level just under the main city level of Kaon's streets.


	19. Chapter 19

"Ankmoor sucks slag." Sunstreaker announced flatly to Clearsight as soon as the three made it to the living flat the SPARTAN XO had arranged for her, as if she didn't know how boring the city she lived in was.

The scout simply shrugged at his remark, not looking back at him as she counted off addresses to find the one she had been given. "What did you expect? We're solidly behind Autobot lines out here."

"Iacon's behind Autobot lines, and there is still more to do there." Sideswipe pointed out, a bit petulantly. "I highly doubt we could even find a half decent bar out here."

Ankmoor was a city of data clerks and information hubs, and was also the location of the servers for the information net that serviced the whole of Cybertron. The sheer amount of data that streamed through the city at any one breem was enough to crash even fifty bots in an instant, and the streamlined surroundings reflected the city's drive for efficiency in all they do.

The oil bars were few and far between, and the extra shops for frame additions and cafés that normally popped up with any decent concentration of Cybertronians in one location were noticeably absent from what little the twin mechs had seen so far.

"At least we're not in Yuss." Came the femme's rejoinder, with a lit to her vocalizer that made the silver twin swear she was teasing them. "Besides, the quite is a good thing. It'll be easier to know when you screw up."

"You mean if, right?" The swordmech gave the red back plates in front of him a pointed glare.

Consulting the data pad that the XO had pressed on her when she agreed to train the two, Clearsight compared the address to the one of the living unit before her. "When. It's to be expected, especially since I have ways to cheat and you don't."

She entered the security code on the pad into the system locking the flat, and gave a relieved sigh when the door slid open to reveal a living unit that was better furnished than the one she had just prior to leaving the city.

Shadowdancer had made it clear that if she did take the twins to be trained for the first few stellar cycles, she would spring the funds for a proper living unit for her, as her apartment probably didn't have the room for two additional guests that would be staying for any length of time. The SPARTAN-Bots' tactician had more credits earned as a landlord and business owner than even the two Enforcer SPARTANs had together, and paid for the flat herself once the scout made her decision.

It was obviously better than her temporary home had been, larger for one. It was a split level unit, with a common room and two berth rooms on the lower floor, and from the specs she had of it, there was another berth room, the wash racks, and a large empty space on the higher level.

"Cheat?" She finally had Sunstreaker's full attention, the first time for the entire drive out to her city, as he inspected her frame as if he could spot her methods of cheating by simply looking for it.

The scout blinked at him as the two followed her into the flat, then smirked at them both as the door locked behind them. "I can cheat by doing this."

'This' was punctuated with her armor plates flickering in and out of view for a astrosecond, then her entire frame, from her helm to her pedes, faded out of the twin's sight.

Sideswipe gave a yelp, backing up into the newly closed door to the living flat, looking around wildly and trying to pin point the femme by another means. "WHAT THE _FRAG!_ "

 _:Stop panicking and_ look _.:_ Came Sunstreaker's response through the twin's bond. The melee specialist gave his brother a disgusted look as he started to calm down. _:She's standing right where she was before.:_

The silver twin pulled a face back, before inspecting the last spot the scout had occupied. It took him a few more moments than it seemed either were happy with, but when the femme crossed her arms the flickers of the optical camouflage moving clued in the swordmech on how to look for her.

She hadn't turned entirely invisible, like he had first thought. Up close, there was a certain amount of distortion that outlined the femme's armor, and if you squinted right you could almost see the shadows that armor cast on her frame. _:How the slag did you know?:_

 _:I chatted up Refit about SPARTANs in general while you kept planning all those pranks when the majority were back in Iacon.:_ The gold twin's tone was definitely smug, gaining him a rude gesture from the silver mech.

"Are you two done?" Clearsight flickered back into view. Her expression wasn't entirely happy, but she wasn't annoyed either. "Why it is you Cybertronians still have optics is beyond me, especially since your entire race would rather go off of the data you pick up by other means."

Sideswipe had started to form a protest, he hadn't been able to see her with his optics in the first place, but stopped as his CPU ran over than whole incident through his processors again.

Clearsight hadn't just disappeared from sight, she had somehow hidden her spark signature and had turned off her internal comms at the same time. The total result had been that she disappeared from every method that the silver swordmech used to keep track of his surroundings and the bots in them, and caused him to panic.

More than a bit embarrassed over his reaction, Sideswipe looked sheepishly at his brother once before giving the scout more of his attention. "So if you can cheat, why can't we?"

"Knight's gotta steer her two mechs into examining her stealth systems first, so they can copy something like it for you." The red and black femme started to wander around the new unit, checking over what she would have to work with for the length of time the twins would be with her. "Then Gale' and 'fit have to argue Ratchet into upgrading you both with the systems. It'll take a bit, so the hard way we go."

She popped back into the main room with a grin.

"I would suggest you two get some rest. I can go a few cycles without fuel or a joor or recharge, but we start the fourth joor of next cycle so you may wish to take care of any other issues now."

\V/

Orpheus grit his dental plates in irritation as the Decepticon recruiter he was talking to gushed on about how the faction was fighting to put to rights all of Cybertron and to keep power hungry bots out of public offices. The assassin had a processor ache he was certain would have made Shadow' curse acidly if ever affected with it, and the mech he was listening to wasn't helping with his enthusiastic spiel.

He had gone straight to a recruiter the moment he slipped pass the Decepticon blockade right outside of Polyhex's city gates, eschewing even settling back in the city of miners and metalworkers for getting on top of his duties as the SPARTAN-Bot in residence.

The great furnaces and smelting pits that never rested continuously belched a great amount of soot and ash into the dim skies, and the assassin had to spend a few breems wandering around out of sight simply to acquire the dingy, dirt smeared look every other resident of the city held from the ever working factories and metal works that made up the higher levels of Polyhex.

As of right now, he was seriously of the opinion that if he killed this recruiter, maybe he could make it happen so no bot would notice and he could then take a cycle or two before trying again with one that chatted less.

Rubbing the side of his helm, his orange optics locked on the wildly gesturing mech, Orpheus tried to ignore the recruiter while at the same time keep track of what he was saying. While the processor ache felt like acid had gotten on his CPU and was eating it's way down to his memory core, he wondered a little bitterly if the blathering idiot before him had been told to numb whatever recruits he got by talking them half way to the Pit before getting to anything important.

"-so, you heard my little speech, what do you think you can do for the Decepticon cause?" The mech peered at him with his red optics, almost as if he thought he could read the assassin's spark by inspecting his frame.

' _Kill everything that moves for kicks, maybe?'_ However, since it was the first question the recruiter had asked of him, he supposed that the answer he wanted to give probably wouldn't go over too well. "I was a part of a security firm before I moved here. Thought about joining the Enforcers, but they have too many rules. Been kicking around as a gladiator, but that's starting to get boring. Thought I might get to go back to security with you all."

"Ah, wonderful! I may just get you working in Darkmoor with that resume." The mech beamed at him, causing a twitch to develop in the assassin's left optic. He looked down to consult the data pad he had, looking for a slot a security specialist in the list of bots he was looking for.

' _Sure you will, just like I can open your helm up like a tin can._ ' Orpheus suppressed the desire to point out that most of the Decepticon forces he had seen already comprised of non-combat orientated bots, since he was playing a mech that hadn't been out of Polyhex recently.

Shadowdancer had worked out a history for him, given it over to Spotter to fabricate the digital data work, and given him an entire data pad that had the history of one 'Orpheus: security expert', some once idealistic and now bitter mech that wasn't a obviously well trained assassin. It said, right at the top, not to display any knowledge of events or happenings outside of the city gossip.

Which either didn't really say much about the tactician's faith in his intelligence, or was a crack against assassins and their skills on a whole.

He still couldn't decide if she was picking on him or had included that as a not so subtle reminder.

"Right, well," the mech he was not really listening to slid an extra pad over to him, "report here next cycle at the time it says, and we'll see exactly what you're made of."

Orpheus swept up the pad with a barely civilized nod to the recruiter. He had a date in the nearest gladiator pit to work out his frustration.

\V/

Tigerstripe met up with Drax at a small bar, tucked away near the south side of the Aero Division Headquarters.

It was ground bound establishment for working class bots, meaning Markmaker was present as well when the larger seeker strolled in. The Enforcer had another two cycles to kill of his leave before he would be expected back at his station for patrols.

Sliding into a chair, the aerial tank nodded sharply at his ground bound brother before fixing his optics on the new Air Commander with a grin. "There's a bit of shock going around, most of the seekers seem to have thought Starscream was going to take up the title."

"Pity for him." The trine leader snickered with a wicked smirk. "Wonder how badly we messed up his plans?"

"What plans?" Markmaker looked from one seeker to the other in confusion. "Who are you talking about?"

Drax shifted enough in his chair to grin at the tank framed Enforcer next to him. "Thought you were going to leave seeker business to seekers?"

The SPARTAN-Bots' Second in Command pointed a finger joint in the trine leader's cockpit.

"Normally, yes. I don't care as long as whatever you do doesn't land you in my Station's cells. But," he prodded the other SPARTAN, "when you're dealing with slag that may end up in my lap, I would like a helms up about it."

"Fair enough." Prying the finger joint off him, the dark painted seeker turned more fully in his chair to look Markmaker in the optics. "Starscream was the last member of the trine that took out Sentinel Prime. 'Stripes here shot him in the neck cables, but it wasn't enough to kill the fragger before he escaped. Rules of the seeker council state that either the surviving members of the old Air Commander's trine or the bot that killed him can take the title without being vetted and selected by the seekers on a whole. Which takes a few vorns at the least."

Drax set his elbow joints on the table between them and grinned over his laced finger joints at the tank staring at him.

"There's been a few rumors bouncing around about what Starscream intended to do as the new Air Commander, the scuttlebutt was that he was going to take the Division to the Decepticons."

Markmaker blinked at the two. "Seekers are Decepticon?"

"Not entirely, majority is though." Spotter appeared from out of the crowd slid into a chair next to the larger tank. "Sorry I'm late. Did we order already?"

"What took you so long? I thought you only went to say goodbye to 'fit?" Tigerstripe scrutinized the slighter seeker as he passed on the cube of regular energon spiced with hot mercury. "How you can drink this slag is beyond me."

"You say that every time I order this."

The recon scout took a gulp before giving his expectantly waiting trine leader a salute.

"Sent it off with the latest data pack the council sent off with the news of the new Air Commander, they didn't see me adding it in. And to answer your question," the slim silver seeker shoved his elbow joint into the side of his trine mate, "I was working. What was your excuse?"

" _I_ wasn't late." The aerial tank shot back with a grin.

"Not that, the slag _you're_ drinking."

Tigerstripe curled his large, clawed hands around his cube, mid-grade energon with enough acid in it to peel even Cybertronian paint off, and pulled a face at Spotter's grin. "Lay off. I like it, and that's all that matters."

"So why in the Pits do I need your approval for what I drink?"

Drax had his helm in his hands and was trying to figure out if he shot one of his trine mates for starting annoying and petty arguments, would Markmaker be forced to arrest him even if he was still on leave?

The Enforcer himself was chuckling as he got up from the table.

"Try not to kill each other," the tank paused, leaned down, rapped his knuckle joints on the helm of the new Air Commander, and spoke low enough so the other two seekers wouldn't pick up on it, "and, yes. I would have to arrest you."

He wandered out, intent on seeing if a particular seeker femme would be against catching an entertainment vid with him.

The assault specialist grumbled under his intakes and slumped down in his chair, cursing out the SPARTAN-III's familiarity with Covert Ops soldiers in general and their usual thinking patterns.

\V/

"May I remind you that I object to this?" Axel called out as he craned his helm to glare behind him, even if he already knew that Nitro wouldn't be there to be glared at.

Silence was all that answered the bounty hunter.

The streets were darker than normal in this side of Simfur, the slums on the edge of the city were not a place any bot wanted to be alone in the off-cycle. The desperate out here were more ruthless than normal, the remnants of old business owners that had lost their livelihood and the bots they dragged down with them made up this section of the slums.

This comm unit was one of three in the area, and the only publicly usable one still working in a mile wide radius.

Muttering about Praxians and their screwed up methodology, the silver and blue mech started to punch in the numbers for the contact Shockwave had given him and Copper when he hired them. The screen spat static and hissed as the connection went through, making the bounty hunter wince at the sudden stab of bright light assaulting his optics.

"…hzzt - who are you, hmm?" The vid screen settled on showing the faceplate of some mech Axel had never seen before, not that the little fact was too surprising. "I wasn't aware that Lord Shockwave was expecting any calls from this frequency."

"Err… yeah. My designation is Axel, and I was-"

"Oh! Oh my, yes. We've been looking for you." The other mech's red optics peered at him, inspecting the silver and blue mech's battered and dented armor, dirt encrusted transformation seams, and scraped paint, then offered a rather inane statement at the picture the other mech made. "Have a rough time of it lately?"

Axel had a brief moment where he considered telling the mech the crazy sounding truth simply to see how he would react, but stuck to the script that both Shadowdancer and Nitro had fed him ever since their little meeting. "Something like that. The mech was better than we counted on, and he's been hunting me ever since. This was the first time I got more than a few joors free without Enforcers and that mech on my aft since."

"Yes yes yes, but did you find out anything useful?"

"You could say that," the bounty hunter gritted out, "the mech can keep going for cycles without refueling or recharge, saw him do so repeatedly when he was hunting me down for the last few stellar cycles."

"Fascinating." The mech on the vid screen sat back, seemingly sidetracked by that bit of info. "You have collected data on this, yes? How long he can go, when he seems the least focused?"

"As much as I could and then some. But here's a question for you," Axel leaned forward to glare at the tiny image before him, "how am I supposed to get it to you if the mech is trying his hardest to deactivate me?"

He seemed to consider that intently for a few moments.

"Hmm, quite. That does seem to be a problem. How do you know that this mech you and your…" He trailed off as he consulted a data pad before him, "where is your partner? Two of you were hired for this operation."

"Dead."

"Pity, it would have been interesting to hear of his version of events." The mech mused out loud, either ignoring the very annoyed expression on the bounty hunter's faceplate or dismissing it as unimportant. "Remain in the area, we have a number of bots ready for just this type of occasion. You can call him Keelhaul."

"Right…" Axel ground out as the link was cut off from the other side. He stood there glaring at the terminal sitting there innocently for a moment before stomping off to see if he could find the Praxian mech that steered him here.

He was not in a happy mood. The walk from Iacon to Simfur had been excruciatingly long for him, even without the little bouts of sparing the SPARTAN mech had insisted on to rough up his armor. Nitro had even pointedly lectured him on the importance of not being fingered as a 'mole' too fast, then had to spend a few joors explaining that organic idiom to him.

Really, the demolitions specialist had worried over him like a half wired creator bot, and it rubbed the bounty hunter's synapse the wrong way.

Axel didn't find Nitro, but the mech he was instructed to call Keelhaul found him. As the bounty hunter was looking over the nearest stack of crates, the mech crept up behind him. Before Keelhaul could grab on to the slimmer mech, Axel twisted around and kicked out a pede, only to have that leg assembly caught by the rough looking mech.

He grinned at the bounty hunter, not at all upset that he couldn't sneak up on him. "Amp sends his regards. I'm supposed to be getting you out of the city quiet like, right?"

"Yeah… if you can keep from trying to jump me." A twist to his pede made him jump before the other mech let him go.

"Well then, if you're being hunted, we should be going." Keelhaul swept him a mocking bow with a wide grin, one arm flung out as if to point the way.

"You first, mech. No offense, but I'd rather be attacked from the back by a bot I don't know."

The other mech's grin didn't twitch, but Axel got the impression that he had picked the right way to deal with this bot as he started walking down the decrepit street. One look back was all he had time for, still trying to spot his SPARTAN shadow, before following along.

He really hoped Nitro was just very good at hiding, not leaving this bit entirely up to him.

\V/

"So… why does Warcry want to talk to us, Knight'?" Wheeljack asked the SPARTAN-Bots' sniper as a preoccupied Perceptor joined the two in the tank's office in Iacon's Autobot base.

The SPARTANs' CO wasn't in at the moment; he was sorting out where Galeforce and Silentforce would go since the two mechs no longer had the excuse of training Sideswipe and Sunstreaker to avoid even a temporary reassignment until the unit reconvened in an estimated two vorns. He had passed on the request to talk to both the inventor and the scientist about something, but Knightblade was being rather uncharacteristically mute about the topic of the whole affair.

The bluish gray and black painted femme gave him a weak looking grin as she settled herself on her absent superior's desk, leaving the two chairs before said desk open for the visiting mechs. "Honestly? I really don't know. There were a few things that I was supposed to ask you two about myself, but I don't know for _sure_ what it is War' wants to ask you."

"With the possibility of suspending our submitted itinerary for our return to Crystal City for the reasons your commanding officer has seen fit to withhold, I propose you put forward your request while we have the usable time to ponder before us." Perceptor stated mildly without even looking up from the data pad he had requested from Ratchet earlier that cycle.

Knightblade had to give her permission for the scientist to have a copy of her system blueprints, including as much of it as the medic had been able to puzzle out, and the older mech was currently buried up to his optics in it while the three waited.

The sniper pulled a face at the preoccupied scientist just as Warcry entered his office. "Careful, Knight', or your faceplate might get stuck like that."

She snapped to her pedes and gave him a salute, startling both mechs with her since she normally didn't use her ingrained military manners when it was just them. The SPARTAN-Bots' CO returned the salute as he picked his way past the three, trying not to inadvertently bump any of the bots crowding his office. The bluish gray femme sat back in her spot as he passed her, still a little nervous about whatever this meeting was for.

Settling his bulk in his reinforced chair behind the desk, built to withstand the tank's still considerable weight coming down on it, Warcry gave his sniper an amused look for her choice of seating arrangements, but leaned forward and braced his forearms on his desk to stare at the seated mechs across from him.

"I have a few questions for the both of you. Well… not so much you, 'jack, as Perceptor."

Wheeljack gave the tank a flash of blue light for the qualifier even as the scientist subspaced his data pad and gave the SPARTAN mech his full attention.

"Before you think to ask, no I'm not changing my CPU about letting either one of you look through or map out our systems." Warcry cracked a grin as the expressions of the other two eased. "I trust Knightblade when she said I can trust you, and I haven't seen anything out of the two of you yet that would make me doubt her word on it."

Flattered but trying not to show it, the sniper twisted around see her CO. "Then why are we here?"

Warcry gave her a pointed look in return. "For the little reason you waited until we were all here to bring up."

"Ah… _that_." Knightblade seemed to sink down a bit into herself where she was seated, turning back to face the mechs she had brought with her to the base with a grimace twisting her lip plates. "There's this little thing that 'fit, Gale', and I, are still arguing about, that we'll know the answer to definitively soon, but the outcome still worries a few of us."

Perceptor gave his assistant an expecting look, wondering what it was that was bothering her this time, but refraining from speaking until she managed to choose how she wanted to tell them.

Wheeljack was a little less patient than his fellow mech. "About what?"

"Well… okay, here's the thing." The sniper rubbed her faceplate as she thought through how she wanted to phrase their current almost problem, then dropped her hands to her lap and gave the two expectant mechs her attention. "Humans… are not supposed to be upgradeable. There was a whole lot of issues even replacing damaged _hardware_ for the organic race, sometimes their systems refused the new parts and it caused a whole lot of problems health-wise… err, functionality-wise, when those new parts were rejected. Software… well that was a whole other problem by itself, considering what software we had… um… have. But… reformats _did not happen_. They _could_ not happen… at all, and there is some concern that our new frames and our old ones are not as separate as we assumed, given what happened to 'force's vocalizer."

Both non-SPARTAN mechs exchanged a confused look, but kept silent. Neither of them knew what happened to Silentforce's vocalizer, all they knew was that the mech never used his.

Catching the expressions, Warcry interjected as Knightblade struggled with how she wanted to address the rest of her concerns. "After that cluster frag happened in Kaon, Ratchet finally got to pull Silentforce's vocal system apart to see what it was that was keeping him silent. As it turns out, the conversion the All-Spark gave us missed a few things and his vocalizer was half-organic as a result. Caused him no small amount of frustration, especially when it decided to short out on him when he tried to shout out a warning to the bots he was with right before Sentinel was deactivated."

"Anyways," the sniper interrupted with a wave of one of her hands, "humans only lived for about a vorn total, two if they were lucky enough to avoid anything life threatening. Taken with the small little matter of 'force's half-organic glitch, that Ratchet still hasn't found the originating problem for, there is a three way argument going on about what will happen when we hit the time limit for our original human lifetimes."

"The first argument is 'fit's, she's of the opinion there is going to be nothing going wrong with us." The SPARTAN-Bots' CO started for the scientifically inclined femme. "She thinks that the All-Spark wouldn't have missed something so important when it knocked into us, and that 'force's glitch is more of a previous injury or an interrupted conversion rather than a sign that we're not as well put together as we had thought."

"My own take on the issue is a little more… worrying. I'm of the opinion that the conversion was more of a window of opportunity that the All-Spark took to do… something for whatever reason." Knightblade rubbed her hand across her faceplate again, shifting around on the desk uncomfortably.

The reasoning behind the SPARTANs' conversion hadn't really been discussed in the unit, most of them just wanted to deal with the reality of the war going on first before they started in questioning or speculating on why they were here.

As a result, there were various different theories among the unit of seventeen as to why the SPARTANs still _existed_ at all, much less in the form of something they hadn't been originally, and what it meant to each of the once human soldiers. Even just leaving out the 'spark' vs. 'soul' side of the equation, there was still the physical one to address.

"We have had a few problems arise already," she continued. "So far, they've been mostly little software glitches that Spotter spends a lot his time writing patches for when they pop up. I'm a little concerned that we may crash or something a little worse, when our still sort of human base codes insist we are supposed to be degrading in our frames in preparation for our deactivation as per our organic roots when our original function was supposed to cease."

"What kind of problems?" The inventor blurted out with a pulse of yellow light spilling from his vocalizer fins. This was the first time he had heard of something bothering the SPARTANs, and he was certain Ratchet hadn't heard of something similar, or he would have mentioned it so he could watch the sniper for any issue.

The SPARTAN femme pulled out her own data pad and paged through it. It held the numerous little glitches that all of the SPARTANs had already seen Refit for while they were here, even if she wasn't the unit's official medic yet. They had gotten them past the former AI's irritable teacher by explaining the problems away as simple fixes overdue for their frame's maintenance.

"Little things, small calibration errors that creep into our spatial recognition programs, some little glitches in our optic and fine motor controls, and the like. 'fit's gone through our unit bot by bot and fixed the majority of them, but the rate these errors are cropping up is what's bothering me. Most of which are not abnormal for Cybertronians functioning well beyond forty or fifty vorns of function. But our frames have only been out of stasis lock and actively used for a vorn, if you discount the time spent in stasis _after_ the conversion from human to Cybertronians, 'fit had said there was some time between a few of the frames completing their conversion to hitting dirt outside of Kalis. Even if you take in consideration the few more vorns we have since the moment the All-Spark hit us, the rate of the errors is a bit more advanced with us than any normally built Cybertronian."

She sighed as she handed over the data pad for the two to look over, even if the information would inevitably end up in Ratchet's less than pleased servos within a cycle or two.

"Gale' is positive _something_ is going to happen, but he's not so sure it's going to be something as dire as deactivation or some kind of processor glitch that will affect our function. Spot' just so happens to agree with him, his guess is based on how much he's been through in our programming and what he's seen so far."

"These calibration inconsistencies could prove to be a holdover symptom of your previous nature." Perceptor mused aloud as he read the information on the pad over Wheeljack's shoulder joint. "Organic based creatures seem to have many differentiating base functionality levels."

Knightblade gave a small laugh as she got off the tank's desk only to lean back against it once she was on her pedes again. "We've already argued this in circles for the last few cycles, before every bot started to leave, and the officers have come to an agreement about what we're to do about this. Holdout said it the best when she said there really isn't anything we can do about it until we know for sure what it is that's going to happen. So she, Shadowdancer, Markmaker, and War' decided to adopt a 'wait and see' approach to this."

The scientist hummed noncommittally, but the inventor shoved the data pad at him and fixed the femme a serious look. "Who was supposed to… deactivate first if humans have such a limited function?"

"It really wasn't an exact science, 'jack. Humans didn't have a set expiration date." Warcry leaned back in his chair with a grimace matching the one his scientifically inclined sniper wore. "As far as we can figure, Clear' is the oldest in terms of human function and Shadow' is the youngest. We're not really sure where 'fit… _fits_ in, since she has one of our frames but was actually programmed instead of a naturally occurring sentience."

"There are a few problems with that assumption."

Holding up her hands to prevent the calculations she knew Perceptor was just about to run, Knightblade hurried on before he decided to try and calculate probability anyways. "It might end up being the oldest mech, since human femmes statistically lived longer than the mechs by roughly a stellar cycle. Which could be just enough to edge Orpheus a bit before Clearsight in the 'who deactivates first' category. Or it could be the oldest of the class _threes,_ not the twos, since their augmentation was less about total durability and more about immediate results, which would end up being Tigerstripe."

"I can only hypothesize that there are too many variables in this complication to make a workable thesis without more information." Perceptor pulled out the pad he had gotten from the Head Medic of Iacon and compared them to the list the sniper had compiled, inspecting the systems affected and taking the opportunity to check out what had been bothering the femme he had for his assistant. "We have already noted, both from myself and from young Refit's work that your optics appear to differ slightly from the standard type of optics that have been used in Cybertronian construction, as well as the controls you possess for motor movement. Cybertronians have three to four phalanges on each servo, your unique frames possesses five on your arm assembly and three on your pedes, regardless of frame type. Your recurring operational errors may simply be attributed to working out the small incompatibility rates of an untested frame design."

"How much are you willing to bet on that?" That sarcastic quip earned her a hard look from scientist, and Knightblade raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, that wasn't well… put."

Warcry snickered, as his sniper seemed to wilt under the disapproval of her employer. "Alright you two. The reason I wanted you and 'jack in on this worry, is because I need a bot or two to keep some processor power on this issue, and you've got the free time to do so."

"We really don't have that much time free." Wheeljack rubbed the underside of his jaw plate, casting speculative glances between the SPARTANs in the cramped office. "Between our usual work and picking through what Knight' lets us at in her, we've been rather busy lately."

"All we need is a bot to keep an optic on the malfunction rates in the unit." The SPARTAN tank studied the back plates of the sniper leaning against his desk for a moment. "And to alert some bot if it seems if something is going horribly wrong. Besides, you have more free time than Shadow' does, she was going to keep part of her battle computer on this."

"To whom would you wish this alert to be presented to?" Perceptor turned his attention from his cringing assistant back to the list of malfunctions that had cropped up in the SPARTAN-Bots' first vorn of function. "I would assume, from your previous statements that your intention is to have another individual warned if your complications become severe?"

Now that the older mech had stopped looking at her like he had, the sniper rejoined the conversation. "Optimus… and Ratchet."

The tank winced. "He's not going to be all too happy with us keeping this from him."

"I would be remiss if I did not point out that neglecting to inform the medic who possesses the most of the working knowledge of your frames is rather… foolish."

Knightblade cracked a smile at that, shooting an 'I told you so' look at the burly mech grumbling behind her. "We don't want to bother him about something that may or may not turn out to be nothing but simple but depressing speculation. The moment it gets into being a problem, we'll inform him."

\V/

"Care to say that again, Starscream?"

The seeker winced away from the looming image of the Decepticon Commander, even if the image was only on the display screen in front of him.

"I _said_ ," gritted the mech, wincing a little at the screeching break his vocalizer had taken to issuing ever since that massive seeker had shot him in the neck cables, "that one of the trine that deactivated Thunderstrike and Cloudwalker have taken the Air Commander title."

It stuck in the former scientist's gears that he was being forced to report a failure to Megatron so soon after his 'official' defection from the Aero Space Division to the Decepticons. However if he didn't, then one of the other seekers he had been carefully recruiting would inevitably let it slip to another Decepticon, and the seeker did not want to find out what the mech on the screen would do to him if it got out he was withholding information.

A few thousand miles away in a briefing room stuck under the main levels of Gygax, Megatron glared at the tiny image of the seeker staring balefully back at him.

"Are you trying to tell me that I should have approached another seeker about leading the aerial forces of my troops," the massive mech growled at the vid screen, optics narrowing on the seeker's own.

"No," Starscream hesitated, optics flickering from the image of the massive silver mech to the silent one standing at Lord Megatron's back, "I'm saying that there seems to be more players in this game than you seem to think. There are no records of these three seekers, not in Hailstorm's history servers and not in the backed up records of all seekers ever built hidden below the towers of Vos. They simply appeared almost a vorn ago with a number of other bots, who also just happen lack records of _any_ kind."

Soundwave shifted from behind the Decepticon Commander, drawing farther from the shadows of the underground room. "Explanation: Improbable."

"You try finding out anything about these slagging bots then," Starscream sneered back with the force of his affronted pride, "all records only appear after a certain point of time and cover next to _nothing_ about who they are or what they do."

The seeker hit something on the terminal on his side of the connection, and the Decepticon's communications officer took the vid file passed on, noted the origin of the bot who took it, and played the file on another screen for the Decepticon Commander. "Identity of unit recording: Bonecrusher. Location: Iacon."

Megatron spared him only a backwards glance from the poor quality vid, watching the ill-fated assault of the Autobots' Iacon base with a carefully measured expression. Starscream could still tell when the unknown bots appeared. Both of the Decepticons on his vid screen leaned forward slightly.

Other than a slight widening of Megatron's optics, and a minute tilt to Soundwave's helm, there were no other signs that either mech were watching the slaughter of their own forces by a number of oddly built bots.

After the vid had finished playing, the Decepticon Commander twisted his lip plates in what could have charitably been called a smile, but looked more like a sneer. "Very well then, Starscream. You bought yourself half a vorn to work with. I would advise you to work quickly. If you fail, we'll level the city, and _you_ in it."

The massive mech didn't wait for any confirmation, already on his way out the moment he was done speaking.

"As you command, Lord Megatron." The seeker on screen gave the two a mocking bow only Soundwave saw before severing the connection.

Megatron was already out of the communications room and halfway down the hall by the time Soundwave caught up, since he had lingered behind to ensure that the seeker had not tried to send any viruses through during the conference call. "Do these bots have any connection to the ones Shockwave is trying to investigate?"

"Answer: Possibly." The communications officer was already trying to enhance the vid images from the file to clear up the grainy resolution, inspecting each of the bots as the vid quality improved enough to get a good look at their physical appearance. "Speculation: More than unit Shockwave predicts."

"Give me an estimate, Soundwave. How many are there?"

"Estimated number: Fourteen. Accuracy of estimation: Unlikely to be many more, possibly one or two at most."

Since the two had arrived at the meeting hall that normally held a number of Decepticons that were not currently working at their various assignments, Soundwave took control of a number of the vid screens that plastered the wall and projected the bots he had managed to identify as the ones Starscream had been referring to.

"Current locations: Unknown."

Megatron had not lost his twisted sneer, optics flickering over the number of bots that his left hand mech had cleared up for identification purposes. Since the vid Soundwave had to work with was taken in the middle of battle, most of the bots were in the middle of deactivating the rift raft that had been sent with Bonecrusher to test the security of Iacon.

Obviously less concerned than the Autobots about the number they killed, it was clear that a number of them were using the occasion to blow off some aggression, since even if they had ranged weapons in hand most of them were fighting hand to hand.

As the number of bots painted across the vid screens continued to develop, two of the off duty Decepticons started as a familiar image of a dark painted Praxian femme suddenly got plastered across the screen right in front of them.

Barricade's optic ridges rose sharply even as Blackout nearly choked on his cube of energon. The renegade military officer scowled as he recalled the battle in question, and how the bots had snatched something that had looked like victory, and turned it into a complete rout within breems.

The helicopter next to him nudged him in the side sharply, distracting the shock trooper from his memory files. "Hey… isn't that femme Shadowdancer?"

"Where…" Barricade trailed off as the image that Blackout was pointing to developed a bit more, adding in the details of the device the barkeeper still had emblazoned on her left arm armor plate. "…yeah, I think it's her."

"No wonder she normally takes to bouncing rather than tending the bar." With a broad grin, the hunter leaned back in his chair, still admiring the vid of the femme wielding a sword that had just left some bot's spark chamber a gaping mess. "I never saw that fragging sword on her before, wonder where she hides it."

"Barricade, Blackout, come _here_."

Both mechs stiffened, but obediently scrambled to their pedes and approached Megatron and Soundwave, both of who had listened in on their conversation. The Decepticon Commander made a beckoning motion to his communications officer, and the dark blue and silver mech pulled up the image of the femme the two had been talking about on the screen closest to the four.

"Do you mean to tell me you know who this is?" Megatron placed one of his claws on the image of the Praxian femme, his red optics locked on the two he had summoned over.

The helicopter grimaced slightly, looking between the two standing in front of him. "Yeah, she's not too far away from here, actually, if she is who we think she is."

"Her designation is Shadowdancer. She, another helicopter femme named Zephyr, and a mech by the name of Dreadnought run a bar called _Eternity's Drift_ near the dock district." Barricade had a frown on his faceplate as he tried to recall everything he had heard about the femme. "She used to work the gladiator rings up till a few stellar cycles ago, and somehow popped up one cycle with a sparkling attached to her hip joint. No bot knows if it's hers or just a lucky bit of metal she stumbled across."

"There ain't too much more known about her." Blackout shook his helm as he thought about the bots that had tried to get closer to the femme, and the beaten up state they normally got to before they stopped out of a sense of self preservation. "Shadow' really hates it when some bot asks her about her history, and she tends to get… _violent_ when she's unhappy with something."

Megatron grinned wickedly. "That is really too bad. You two will take Soundwave to meet this… _Shadowdancer._ Soundwave, I want to know what she knows."

The communications officer simply nodded, but Barricade winced and addressed the Decepticon Commander directly. "She's not there at the moment, Lord Megatron. Shadow' took the sparkling to get upgraded earlier in the megacycle, and from what Dread' said she's due back at any time, but she wasn't there when we went last off-cycle."

"No matter," the massive silver mech took a few steps to the throne like chair he normally reclined in when he wanted to watch the industry of the Decepticon High Command, "you three will go bar hopping until she returns. I trust you have no objections to this plan."

Blackout simply grinned in return as Barricade gave a rueful chuckle.

\V/

"I'm not really sure if I should be happy that we're home again, or horrified over what you just did."

"You make it sound like there is a choice in there. Can't it be both?" Shadowdancer smirked at the annoyed glare Zephyr gave her for that quip, slinging her unoccupied arm over the helicopter's shoulders and giving the other femme a squeeze. "Sides, I told you to hurry it up, don't blame me for killing others just to keep you alive."

The femme who had once been an Enforcer shoved the Praxian away, a scowl twisting her lip plates. The three of them had just recently gotten through the underground tunnels to enter Gygax, and a small knot of soldiers had spotted the helicopter when she was trying to deal with the seals over the tunnels. Shadowdancer had been forced to kill all three of them to prevent them from reporting the three's presence to whatever they reported to.

"How was I supposed to know that scouting party was getting closer? All you said was to get into the tunnels as fast as I could."

Still snickering, the SPARTAN adjusted her balance and leveled herself out before Kynaite even registered that his adoptive carrier had been unbalanced. "Well… maybe you need to get your CPU reformatted, you seem to be slowing on the whole 'being aware of your surroundings' part."

She ducked a badly aimed swing at her helm, laughing harder at her youngling's innocent request to be let in on what the joke was.

"Kynaite, your carrier is being mean to me, make her stop." Zephyr whined in his direction.

The youngling took her at her word, giving the femme holding him a jab in a conveniently located tangle of wires and fluid lines in the arm assembly supporting him. "Stop."

Shadowdancer's door-wings twitched in surprise and she nearly stopped in the middle of the road, speculatively looking over her adopted creation. "Do you really expect that to work, my little mechling?"

"Nope." Kynaite shrugged at her and looked back at the helicopter. "Sorry, no w-wh-ork."

Zephyr suppressed the desire to giggle over the youngling's lisp, which in her humble opinion had only gotten cuter as time marched on. "That's okay, 'naite. We'll just think up something fun to do, and leave Shadow' to her boring work."

"You will not." The tactician frowned at the both of them as they laughed. "We're not expected back at the bar until later in the cycle, so I don't have to work until later, so _work_ is not an acceptable excuse for leaving me out."

Elevating her helm and giving a snooty sniff, she cracked a grin as Kynaite nearly tumbled out of her arms from laughing too hard. After a moment, the Praxian looked over at the helicopter curiously.

"What kind of work do I have to do anyways? Dread was supposed to handle the orn to orn stuff while we were gone."

"Well, yes… but," Zephyr held up a hand when the SPARTAN femme's expression changed from curious to wary, "there were a few things piling up that even Dread wouldn't know how to deal with, a few things that needed your digital signature, and another issue I know you don't want to think about."

Shadowdancer's expression flattened into a neutral look, and the helicopter winced.

"Yeah, I'm about to nag at you about your paint job again, but really Shadow'-"

"There is nothing wrong with my paint. Nothing is flaking off or cracking," she paused and looked down at some of the older damage that had been done to the feature being discussed, "well, worse than it has been."

"I know!" Grabbing her employer's unoccupied arm, the helicopter tugged the other femme down another road, much to the SPARTAN's bemusement. "But… it doesn't work for the image of a successful business femme, and that's kinda what you need to look like."

Zephyr risked a look at the tactician she was leading along, and hurriedly pressed her point ruthlessly before she could argue.

"Look, you told me the plan you're working on out here, and I agree with you about it, I do. I just think that maybe not looking like a veteran of the gladiator pits would be a good thing to make the Decepticons underestimate you at first glance."

Shadowdancer refrained from pointing out that she _was_ , in fact, a veteran of gladiator pits only by sheer will power, since she had never actually told the other femme what she did before opening the bar. Catching sight of her frame in a polished metal facade of some building that they were now passing, she had to admit that her friend might have a point.

It wasn't really noticeable in a passing glance, but her frame and armor had plenty of nicks and scratches showing flashes of the base metal underneath.

The Praxian sighed, and Zephyr hurried on to prove her point even if the femme behind her had already capitulated.

"You don't even have to change your paint scheme. I know a bot that's really good with both simple and complex designs, and he agreed to meet us solely to work on you."

"Zeph'-"

"I know you're really not all too into frame adjustments or alterations, you don't really have a use for them and I agree, but I thought-"

" _Zeph'_."

"-that maybe you would like to simply take a look this cycle-"

" _Zephyr!_ " The sudden stop of the Praxian femme had the helicopter's vocalizer system issue a squeak that would have gotten her harassed mercilessly at any other time in the femmes' acquaintance. Shadowdancer regarded her embarrassed employee fondly. "I get it. You have proven your point, but for the sake of my fracturing moral coding, could you stop already?"

Zephyr stared at the SPARTAN-Bots' XO, and suddenly broke into a wide smile. "Really?"

With a sigh, the Praxian looked down at her curious youngling. "I'm going to regret this, aren't I?"

"Regret!" Kynaite chirruped back at her, grinning widely.

\V/

"Jackknife, can you do me a favor real quick?" Rook asked as she leaned into the room the underground thieves enforcer had claimed as his since he showed up to 'keep an optic' on her and her activities, frowning at the mech simply lounging around when she was busy working.

The red and gold mech had spent the last two megacycles tagging along with her whenever she left the re-appropriated warehouse she worked out of, from innocent strolls around the city to bug the two Enforcers she knew; the occasional late cycle bar hopping with the same two mechs, another Praxian, and a gaggle of cassettes; to her odd cycle jaunts out to the slums that he still didn't know the reason for.

To his extreme annoyance, she had a horrible habit of simply disappearing for joors on end in the slums and showing back up at the most awkward times possible. Even with all the time he had put into tailing the femme, he was still no closer to figuring out what she was doing than he was when she first found him sitting in her study.

His inability to figure the motives of this ex-thief was rapidly rising to the level where he was _almost_ tempted to corner the two Enforcer mechs she knew to trade information. He was nearly sure of the fact they had more of the puzzle pieces of the gray femme standing in front of him than he did after closely watching her for nearly half a decacycle.

 _Almost_ , anyways. He still had his unprofessional pride to speak of, after all.

"Sure, Rook. What's up?" Jackknife swung himself up into a sitting position on the berth he had claimed for himself, giving her a rather familiar suspicious look even as he figured that he owed her a few favors for letting him crash with her while on this job from his Thief Lord.

"Blue didn't show up for class, so I'm going to go see what's keeping him. Just keep your optics on the students I've got at the moment, they shouldn't need any more instruction for this lesson." She frowned harder at him when he smirked up at her, but then another thought occurred to her and she gave him a smirk of her own. "You know, you might consider joining us every now and again. I'm sure you could always use a tip or two in a fight."

As a matter of fact, Rook knew he would benefit from her class on taking on more than one opponent from the number of incidents she'd had to rescue him out of when she ditched him occasional in the slums, but Jackknife wouldn't hear of it.

"I'm perfectly content with the few skills I have now, and I don't feel like getting my aft kicked every cycle just to improve them. How it is you can do this every cycle and still stroll around the city afterwards is processor blowing. I almost have to recharge while you're working just to keep up"

The SPARTAN femme's smirk grew at the nearly petulant tone coming out of her uninvited house guest. "Bully for you. Wish all of us could simply kick back while watching others work." She crooked her finger joints at the still seated mech as she left his room. "Come on, I'll introduce you before I go."

The red and gold mech swore under his intakes as he got up, glaring at the sly grin the femme tossed back at him to show she still hear him even from that far away before following after her to the main level of the warehouse.

As per usual, Rook had twenty or so bots working out how to use what she showed them spread out in groups of twos scattered across the main floor. Every style of fighting had to be adjusted for the differences in height, weight, and frame configurations of each of the bots learning. Therefore, the saboteur had taken to letting the bots in her paying classes pair off with another bot closer to them in frame size, which was made even easier by the general line model frames most of her paying students had.

They watched her take down two other students with whatever move she was demonstrating for the cycle, one smaller and one bigger than her, showed them the mechanics of the move and what happened to the other bot and the she let them figure out how to modify what she showed them for their own frames.

Normally, during much of the time, they spent a period getting used to the strange and novel ideas she had. One of which was that they _could_ throw a bot without using their hands by getting higher than another bot by whatever means, gripping either the upper chassis or the helm between their pedes and twisting their lower chassis in another direction as their weight came down to provide the torque for the throw.

Rook would flit from pair to pair, ensuring that neither bot acquired injury from overly enthusiastic 'attackers', 'defenders', or just from hitting the floor in an awkward manner. She did occasionally disappear for short pockets of time in class, but always showed back up after a breem or two.

Watching the bots carefully plot out how the move worked from the staircase, Jackknife had another almost unreal moment of unease shudder through him. He had them less and less, as he lived with the femme… but occasionally the tiny little thought that if the femme _really_ wanted to, she could probably order her students to destroy whatever irritated her and very few of them would bother to argue with what she wanted.

Her students were nothing if not devoted by this point; and in every class there were always one or two that had personally seen her use the same moves she was teaching them in a fight to save them from an unwanted conflict with some of the less law abiding denizens of the city.

Rook would never say anything about the incidents in question herself, but every megacycle there was an odd few additions to the classes, who would whisper their personal experience to the others while they were working out under her optics. Her refusal to discuss the events just made her even more popular with each of them, and made the mech seriously wonder if she was simply joking with him when she said she was training an army under the sensors of the Enforcers.

Still either blissfully ignorant or purposely ignoring the way her students looked at her as she walked past them, the gray painted femme worked her way to the main doors of the dojo, pausing here and there to correct the forms or encourage a few of her students. Once she reached the doors, she turned to the class, most of whom had clued in on something being different. "Okay, bots. I have a quick errand to run; so Jackknife over there will watch you while I'm gone. Try not to beat on him too much."

She flashed them all a quick grin as a few laughed and the mech himself glared at her, then yanked the doors open and left at a fast clip.

The class remained properly practicing their newest bit for a bare breem, just to ensure she really was gone, before degenerating into what Jackknife was itching to classify as a massive gossip session. He sat on the stairs, helm between his hands, as the twenty odd bots started to swap stories about the gray femme that taught them, and wondered just what the _frag_ was he was still doing here.

(ooo000ooo)

Strolling down the streets between the warehouse district and the merchant's quarter, Rook decided to stop by briefly at the Enforcer Station that Smokescreen and Blaster worked out of. It was a few joors before they left for their second patrol of the day, and she might just run across her wayward student there. It wasn't likely, but it might be a valid explanation for where Blue had gotten distracted at.

She nodded to Siren and Nightbeat as they left the Station for their patrol at the same time she was going in, two other Enforcers that she had come to know in her periodic sessions of picking on Smokey, and carefully stepped over Steeljaw as the cassette passed by under her on his way to another part of the Station. "Sup, little mech."

The little quadrupedal cassette skidded to a stop, his short muzzle sharply swinging in her direction as he compensated for his suddenly halted forward momentum. "Rook? What are you doing here?"

"M looking for Blue." The saboteur turned back to run her hand over his helm before continuing down the halls. "Are Smokey and Blast still in?"

"Of course they're here, _I'm_ here." He snorted at the apologetic expression cast in his direction and continued down the hall he had been in the middle of traveling when she came in. "They're in the back."

Rook rapped the tips of her finger joints on the wall as he left the hall for another door, carefully tracing her steps down the vaguely familiar Station. She had only been in the building once, and that was back when she wrangled the two Enforcers for the SPARTANs' report in Iacon not more than three megacycles ago, but that was enough for the saboteur to know where her quarry was located with Steeljaw's comment.

By the grace of the less than obvious features of her frame, she managed to sneak up on the two without meaning to, her steps remaining silent out of a force of habit than any deliberate intent to surprise them.

Smokescreen was looking over a case about a rash of muggings in the slum district. The bots had been incoherent when they had been found and refused to speak to Enforcers after they onlined at the closest medic's station.

He was helm to helm with Blaster trying to find any pattern to the attacks that had been reported all over the slums with next to no information about said attacks. They were tracing out where and when the 'attacks' had occurred, lining them up to see if it had been in any one particular section of the city, not just at random.

Rook winced when the pattern clicked in her processor, the 'mugging victims' were in fact bots that worked for Goldbolt that had tried to attack her and Jackknife during her frequent forays into the slums. "Just so you know, _they_ attacked me first. Totally a case of self-defense."

Blaster nearly got Smokescreen's left chevron jammed into the bottom of his jaw plate as they both started at the sound of her vocalizer coming from behind them. The communications expert jerked himself upright, as much to avoid the possibility of getting one of his partner's crystal spires to the neck cables as to see the femme clearly, giving her a less than amused glare with on hand on his chest plates, over his spark chamber.

"Damn, femme. Jingle, make some noise or something. You nearly gave me my first spark attack."

"Rook, why am I surprised?" Leaning back in his chair and throwing the data pad he had been bent in half over on his desk, the diversionary tactician tilted his helm up to give her a glare matching his partner's for intensity.

She shrugged blandly in response as she leaned against a wall. "Beats me, I thought you knew better by now. I'm just here to see if either of you have heard from Blue yet."

"Wait, what?" Sitting fully upright, the red and orange mech turned to place the gray femme squarely in his field of view as his Praxian partner stared at her. "Isn't it time for his class? Why isn't he with you? For that matter, what are you doing _here_ , if you have a class to be teaching?"

"I got Jackknife to watch the students, and I didn't hear from Blue before he decided not to show up, so I think he may have gotten distracted by something shiny on his way in." Rook gave them both a gamin grin. "I'm on my way to the merchant's district to see if he still intends to show up while I got a joor free to run some errands."

Smokescreen relaxed and glowered back at her, which the SPARTAN simply laughed at seeing as the mech was peering at her upside down as he was still leaning back in his chair.

"I don't like that mech. He has a record, you know. There were assault charges and breaking and entering pinned to him a number of vorns ago, and a speckling of the same charges that had been dropped more recently under questionable circumstances. Not the type of bot you should be associating with." He glared harder as she kept laughing at him. "What are you keeping him around for, anyways? It can't be for the intelligent conversation he supplies."

The two mechs had made it clear, to both the femme and to each other, that neither of them liked the other. Smokescreen hated the mech because his Enforcer's programming kept pinging the red and gold mech as a 'bot of suspicious behavior', Jackknife hated the Praxian Enforcer simply on principle.

It had made for a number of awkward off-cycles at the bar, since the underground thieves' enforcer refused to let the femme go out alone even if it was to hang out with a number of Enforcers he would rather avoid. That had raised a number of red flags in the diversionary tactician's CPU, and the cycle had only gotten worse as time marched on.

"Should I be flattered that you ran a background check on the mech living with me, or annoyed you're still questioning me after what I got you included in?" She crossed her arms over her chest plates and pouted at them both. "Next you'll be telling me that I should throw the poor mech out into the street, even if his job has him sticking close to me for the foreseeable future."

"I'd prefer it." The Praxian mech's glower lost some of it's strength at the mention of the SPARTANs' history, and forced the Enforcer to acknowledge that the femme might know what she was doing after all, even if she was harboring some questionable mech. "Do you want to wait a few breems for me and Blaster before you wander off again?"

"Na, I'll just run over quick and grab Blue from whatever distracted him before Jackknife loses his patience with my paying students." Rook wiggled the fingers of her hand at them as she pushed herself upright and started for the doors of the Station. "I'll tell him you might drop by later."

"Which him?" Smokescreen acidly shot over his door-wings at the saboteur's retreating back as he considered how he was to write up the reports for the 'muggings', when they were not, in fact, muggings.

(ooo000ooo)

Now starting to get a bit more than just simply worried, the SPARTAN femme traced the route that Bluestreak normally took to the Enforcer Station to see his brother, which had been altered slightly near the end in the last vorn so the Praxian merchant could visit her dojo for his self-defense lessons. Either way, the younger brother had kept to the same routine since the ex-thief had met him, something that gave her a twinge of guilt when she thought of all the times she should have told the mech to change up his patterns for security purposes.

Forcibly shoving down the faint stirrings of unease that twisted its way through her systems, Rook firmly reminded herself that there was no reason to suspect foul play without any proof, her long years as a Covert Ops agent for the UNSC notwithstanding. _That_ experience told her that the merchant would not be where she hoped to find him, and the reason he wouldn't be where she expected him had to do with her and her less than legal activities in the slums.

Her experience was, unfortunately, proven right when she reached the beginning section of the merchant's district, and end of the section of the city that housed the warehouses, and spotted the extensive damage that had been done to Bluestreak's store with two Enforcers that seemed to have just arrived on the scene.

Quickly ducking into the back alleys she had explored extensively when she had just moved to the city on Shadowdancer's order, Rook activated her stealth system and blessed Spotter's foresight as she triggered an emergency comm link to Holdout. : _Four-five-eight? I need some advice._ :

 _:Well,_ that's _unexpected.:_ The confused tracker commented on the same secured comm channel, blinking her optics and holding up a hand to keep Impactor from distracting her from the odd note she had heard in her 'sister's' tone. _:What in blue blazes do_ you _need my help with? For that matter, why are we talking here and not on the tactical up link?:_

Rook dodged undetected around the two Enforcers that she hadn't met before, sliding silently around the front of the trashed storefront and started to pick around carefully enough that the two bots wouldn't be able to see her messing around. _:Bluestreak, Prowl's youngest brother, just got yanked from his store, I'm thinking unwillingly. I need your help to figure out where whoever took Blue went.:_

Holdout blinked again, this time in plain surprise. The former thief turned SPARTAN saboteur had almost sounded _panicked_ for a moment, and if the tracker hadn't caught the underlying hint of pure rage under the transmitted mental tone of her sister she would have started to feel some concerned herself.

She gave Impactor a sly smile that had the Wrecker Commander _very_ nervous and itching to call Sandstorm over to deal with his femme.

"Give me a breem or two, please." She patted the mech on the arm as she made her way to her office. "A bit of SPARTAN business just popped up."

The SPARTANs' best tracker let herself into the office and slumped down in a chair.

_{One-nine-six, pass this on to three-four-one. We're requesting use of the emergency reserved bandwidth for a situation in Praxus.}_


	20. Chapter 20

Smokescreen nearly barreled over one of the Enforcers on the scene, skidding to a halt and avoiding a collision with a wall only by that same mech bracing the both of them before the Praxian pushed off to inspect the cordoned off store.

Blaster was only a half a breem behind the diversionary tactician, he had remained behind at the Station long enough to get the rest of the report about what happened to Bluestreak's store before following after his partner. The communications expert rubbed the back of his helm and gave the other Enforcer an apologetic shrug before following after his silent friend's rampage through the building.

There was very little left intact, the main show window had been shattered and the shards crunched under pede with every step, bits and pieces of Bluestreak's wares dotted the floor here and there, none of the mess anywhere near where it was supposed to be.

Blaster leaned his frame against the doorway to wait, wincing as his audio receptors picked up the sound of Smokey smashing a fist against some wall farther inside. He kicked at the debris littering the floor as the other Enforcer stomped back into view. "So this may be an odd question for the moment, but if Blue wasn't here when _she_ got here then where did Rook get to?"

The question was either strange enough to the very worried brother's line of processing, or alarming enough for his Enforcer programming, to draw Smokescreen's attention to the lack of said SPARTAN femme. Both mechs looked around the store for a moment, but it revealed no more clues about Rook's whereabouts that it had for Bluestreak's.

The diversionary tactician tried the femme's personal comm line after a silent moment looking over the main room, only getting a busy tone thrown back at him for his effort. "This… this can't be good."

He groaned as a hand was drawn down his faceplate as the dawning realization that he had a possibility of a vastly torqued, once _alien_ ,SPARTAN trained in the fine points of sabotage and warfare loose in the city. An incredibly dangerous bot who would be gunning for whoever had taken Bluestreak, and absolutely no clue on how to locate her before she off-lined the poorly informed, substandard built, tin plated _drones_ that took his brother in the first place.

"This just _screams_ that something is about to go wrong really, really soon."

"Well… if you're going to insist on thinking like that," Blaster drawled to his partner sourly, "can I also point out that the only bots in the city that know _what_ Rook is _and_ some of what she can do, is down to just you and me with Blue gone?"

Smokescreen's processors skidded to a painful halt, the mech staring blankly at the other Enforcer for an astrosecond as he tried to work out what the other was hinting at.

 _None_ of the SPARTANs either of them had talked to so far had even hinted about what they could do beyond the obvious that could be guessed from their job titles. There were some of the stories the other non-SPARTANs and Autobots that they had met in Iacon painted a not-so-pretty picture for the two of them about just how 'warlike' the admitted 'war built' bots could get.

From what little Rook had told them about her previous function before Refit brought them to Cybertron, both Enforcers could guess that she could operate like any decent thief if need be. She knew enough of the basics to feel her way around just about any type of security system ever processed, could hack digital locks, pick manual ones, evade any Enforcer or civilian bot looking for her, and…

Oh dear _Primus_ …

"She's going to _kill_ them."

The communications expert snorted at his partner's horrified expression, forcibly tamping down the same feeling of dread he was sure the Praxian was experiencing. "Remember what Warcry said about their standing orders? She _can't_ unless they _attack_ her first. We just gotta hope they are not feeling especially suicidal this cycle."

"Blast, these are the same bots that spark-napped an Enforcer's _brother_ mid-cycle without, may I point out, even _trying_ to cover their tracks! Intelligence might be in short supply with them."

"Point." Looking around at the mess in the storefront one last time, Blaster ejected Steeljaw from his chest compartment and gave his partner a sheepish grin. "Then we should settle for hoping we get one or two left in enough pieces to question."

\V/

Rook scowled as she ran through the fifth dingy alleyway since she left Blue's store. It looked just like any other countless backstreet path she had passed trying to track down where Bluestreak and his captors had gone, and her impatience colored her tone as she 'talked' with her sister. _{Why this way?}_

 _{Cause I said so, that's why.}_ Holdout snarled back at her without wavering her attention even a small bit off of the ex-thief's optical intake being fed through the tactical up-link.

She was sitting limply in Sandstorm's lap, as the mech had let himself into her office after she cleared the other supply bots out. Impactor told him what little the bronze and black femme had admitted to him, and he had been rather worried until she informed him that she was nearly catatonic with almost all of her processor power concentrated on her sister's plight, not because of anything else.

The two femmes had passed a request through Trickflip to Shadowdancer to use more of the bandwidth Spotter had set aside so it would be available for emergency situations. They had gotten a distracted reply back that the XO didn't care what they did as long as they _didn't_ tie up any of the others or the communications between cities.

After the messages had been passed around and permission given; Rook dearly wanted the time and CPU space to investigate what had the normally fastidious to a fault Praxian femme so wrapped up in her city with another odd tone of worry lacing her mental voice, but regulated that impulse to a secondary memory bank for later as she ran down the back streets of Praxus. Going by the advice of the tracker that was literally jacked into her processors related via the _ATHEN's_ communication array nearly two cites away.

As Holdout was sitting still as a statue in her office in Central in the lap of her Wrecker, her CPU was tasked nearly to capacity with running the bastardized tracking programs she had awoken on Cybertron with. They were a mash of Cybertronian scanning patterns and human search protocols, mixed to the point that none of the SPARTANs that had looked at each other's internal programs, namely Spotter and Knightblade, could tell where one started and the other ended without looking at the language the programs were written in.

The difference was that instead of inspecting every inch of space before concluding what went on from trace evidence like a purely Cybertronian tracker normally would, the two femmes could jump from one point to another if enough evidence presented itself, using an assumption of what likely happened from the tracker's past experience as a human tracker.

Speed wasn't a problem to any SPARTAN, and neither was running the risk of being seen. Rook's frame was built with an emphases on finesse and speed, and her variant of the MJOLINER armor had been optimized for stealth even under extreme circumstances well before the All-Spark's interference.

With Holdout handling the processing, the saboteur could concentrate on keeping her frame from any other optics as she sped through the city, while using the full limits of her frame.

Rook did have the occasional pang of guilt at not waiting around to tell Smokey about his brother as the breems trickled on without sight of Blue, but she didn't want to waste any time hanging around anyplace she couldn't help out. She firmly tried to focus on simply listening to her sister, and not the little bitter part of her processor that insisted that nothing about this cycle could end well for any bot, much less Blue.

_{Take that next right!}_

The saboteur took the right the tracker screeched at her to, and nearly collided into the very bots she was tracking. She lurched to the left side just in time, one of the mechs had taken the opportunity to look back the way he and the others had come to see if there had been any pursuit, and he came very close to getting Rook's right side slammed into his chest plates.

Her momentum took her a few more paces into the group of four, giving the SPARTAN a good look at the bots that had attacked Bluestreak.

They were scratched and dented, marks from the fight that the Praxian had put up in his defense. The merchant himself was all right, a dent on the side of the helm told the femmes why it was the Praxian wasn't making more movement instead of simply hanging limp between two of the bots. _{Thanks, four-five-eight. I owe you a high-grade next time we get together.}_

Holdout took a moment to ensure that her tracking programs had closed down before scaling back her side of the link and stirring in her mech's arms. _{All right, but are you sure you don't want any help? You know you're no good in hostage situations, and me and 'storm could be there in a few joors at the latest.}_

Sandstorm, cluing in to the tracker's returned attention by the increasing amount of wiggling, hugged her briefly before getting up and setting her back in her chair.

"Some bots are gonna die," she sang to him as she flexed her motors with an increasingly wicked grin as the saboteur dithered over whether or not she needed help.

Normally, Rook would have cracked a joke and dismissed any need for assistance. This was far from any normal situation she had ever been a part of. _{Think you can get here before these idiots reach where they want to go?}_

She worriedly checked over the unconscious merchant as she waited for the response.

 _{I'm a SPARTAN too, remember. We'll head out the moment I wrangle Impactor to give us the green light.}_ Holdout got up and gave her mech a stiff hug on her way out of the office, pausing in the doorway only to cast a look back at him. "So, you want to go hunting with me?"

Sandstorm brightened under her gaze. "I'm ready when you are."

\V/

A joor and a number of breems passed, and the bots of Rook's class let themselves out still chattering on about their teacher. Jackknife watched them go, cursing out the femme he was currently living with for leaving him here.

He had gotten a number of odd stories that he intended to check out next time he had a chance, so he figured that it hadn't been a completely total waste of time. Getting up from his perch on the stairs, intending to put up a 'closed for the cycle' sign up so he wouldn't have to watch another class for the femme, he certainly wouldn't get paid for it, when the chime of Rook's external comm device started to ring.

He started cursing out loud as he hurried to lock the warehouse's front door and bolted up the stairs and into the femme's room.

Jackknife had been in the room a few times, and never when Rook herself had been in. He nearly tripped over what looked like a box of tools and a pile of metal shavings before he got to the femme's comm, and hit it for receiving audio only as he sat on her berth. "What?"

"…you're Jackknife, right?"

"Er… yes?" The mech peered at the device, wondering how the bot on the other side of the link knew who he was. "Who am I speaking to?"

"Smokescreen, one of Rook's friends." The mech on the line was almost biting out the words to him. "Has she returned there yet?"

Jackknife could place the vocalizer he was listening to now. The mech was one of the Praxians she hanged out with, the Enforcer one that never stopped glaring at him.

"No. She left almost a joor and a half ago, and hasn't come back yet." He kept his answer short, wondering where the femme had disappeared to.

"Thanks." The external comm chirped, letting Jackknife know that the other mech had closed the connection.

The mech leaned back, giving the device a glare, wondering what Rook was up to, and why he had agreed to watching her class of gossips. With a disgusted groan at his own indecisiveness, the mech disabled the external comm unit and started for the warehouse's main exit.

He had a vague idea of where the gray femme could have gotten to, and damn it all if he was just going to hang around if she was tearing something up.

\V/

Smokescreen tapped his finger joints on the side of the public comm unit he had commandeered for his quick call before pushing off and returning to Blaster, who had merely smirked at the Praxian's claim to check in at the gray femme's dojo to see if she had showed up there yet.

The communications expert gave the other Enforcer a grin as he kept one optic on the progress of his cassettes through Bluestreak's storefront. "She wasn't there, was she?"

"No," the Praxian glared at the grin, "please tell me you have _something_."

Blaster's grin faltered. "Maybe. Nothing that would be permissible in any court."

Smokescreen blew out a sigh through his vents and rubbed his hands over his faceplate. "Give it to me anyways."

"You remember when we were in Iacon, and we were waiting for that horrible history lesson with both your brothers?" The red and orange mech grimaced at the other Enforcer's sour expression. "I spent a little time before that talking to that silver and white seeker, the one they called Spotter, about the frequencies that are used for emergencies. A few of his comments didn't make sense until I was thinking about it in light of their little 'confession', and a few things became a bit clearer."

He rubbed the back of his helm as he recalled the incident in question and the number of awkward moments that came after.

"I figured out that Spot' takes care of their communications before he admitted it to me before we left, and I think I know what frequencies they use in emergencies. The Enforcer scanning station near the slums picked up a heavily encrypted transmission along what I think they use not too long ago, that made me think of that conversation I had with that seeker mech because of the encryptions. I took a look at it while I was waiting for you, and I think that was Rook talking to another of the SPARTANs."

The Praxian jerked upright, pinning his partner with a mildly irritated look. "You're only _now_ mentioning this?"

Smokescreen turned and started to walk out of his brother's store, forcing the other mech to jog in order to keep up after beckoning to his cassettes to follow.

"Can you tell me what it was about?"

"No, I can't make helms or pedes out of it. Most of it makes no sense, and what I can pry out of it looks like a search program." Blaster grabbed his elbow joint and jerked him to a halt, pulling the other mech to the side of the street instead of standing in the road blocking traffic. "What little I did get told me that the recipient is in Central City, and didn't Rook say Holdout, the tracker femme, was there at the Autobot base with the Wrecker unit?"

When the Praxian nodded slowly, the communications expert hurried on.

"Then what I picked up _was_ a tracking program, meaning our ever so lovable saboteur is already on the bots that have Blue's tail. Problem is; I can't go to the Chief with the comm line. It's a private line, completely legit and illegal to pry into without some bot's consent. On top of that, I can't crack it, and even if I did do you really want to explain to him that we have known the location and identity of a war built bot and haven't told him yet?"

"No… no I don't, but give me another option."

Blaster opened his mouth components as he thought, closed them when nothing occurred to him, and winced. "Well, this isn't going to be pleasant."

Smokescreen gave his partner a dry look. "You don't say."

\V/

Warcry was on his way to seeing Silentforce off to his next post, the defensive specialist had volunteered to watch the XO's back in Gygax, when Shadowdancer pinged his comms, a thread of amusement lacing her mental tone. _{Got a moment?}_

_{Three-three-seven is almost ready to head out to where you're at. If this is about-}_

_{No, well_ … _not entirely. Got a bit of news that may affect that, but do you know what four-five-eight and one-two-seven needed with the emergency lines about three breems ago? They suddenly dropped the link before I could get enough processor power to get a good look at what they were doing, but it nearly slowed Spotter's web down enough to affect me.}_

The Autobot paused in his tracks, blinking bemusedly into space and ignoring the few bots that passed him in the halls. _{No, I wasn't aware they used that.}_

 _{Perfect, you may want to look into that. I'll chat up three-three-seven while you're occupied.}_ Shadowdancer's tone was mildly amused as her part of the link faded back into the tank's CPU.

Warcry cursed out loud and changed directions, heading to his office as he started pinging the saboteur and the tracker's comms. Neither one picked up on their personal lines, but he finally got through to them using their part of the tactical up-link as he sat his bulk in his chair. _{Either one of you want to inform me of what is going on?}_

 _{Oh_ … _slag, sir. Was kind hoping that we could fix this before you picked up on it.}_ Rook sounded almost equally panicked and apologetic, an odd enough occurrence to make the SPARTAN-Bots' CO instantly wary about whatever was going on.

 _{One-two-seven, I would appreciate a full debrief on what you're doing.}_ The tank laced his finger joints together as he leaned back and frowned at his desk, mildly glaring at the stack of data pads waiting for his attention that seemed to grow every joor he wasn't working at it. _{I've got three-four-one making snide hints at me, and I really don't want to admit to her_ again _that I have no clue what you're up to.}_

{ _Damaging to your pride, sir?_ }

Holdout's end of the link came from a location that had Warcry bolting upright in his chair in surprise and glowering at the far wall. _{Where the slag are you going?}_

From what the tank could tell, and he knew enough to know that he only had a tenuous grasp on Cybertronian encryptions and triangulating programs, it looked like the tracker was halfway between Praxus and Central City, heading south-east on the highways between the cities to Praxus.

 _{Praxus.}_ Holdout sounded damnably cheerful, but there was an odd tone to it that took the tank's CPU a moment to figure out. _{One of the mechs that one-two-seven associates with has been spark-napped.}_

The hesitance in that last sentence had the CO's full attention. _{Praxus? That would be_ … _oh, frag._ Prowl's _brothers?}_

 _{I said_ one _of them, sir. It's Bluestreak. Guess they figured he would have less combat experience. One-two-seven's on them, she's following them around while they drag the poor mech to wherever they're going, but she didn't argue about needing backup, so me and 'storm are en-route.}_ The tracker sounded less apologetic than the saboteur, but still slightly off.

 _{Start at the beginning, and don't leave anything out.}_ Warcry glowered at his linked hands for a moment before getting up to head to the Prime's office. _{Then we all need to have a long conversation about proper respect due to superior officers, and when you_ need _to report in unusual occurrences.}_

Holdout's response was prompt. _{Yes, sir.}_

Rook's was less so. _{_ … _do we have to?}_

_{If you have to ask, then yes.}_

\V/

Smokescreen lead Blaster and his cassettes into their Station, giving Nightbeat and Siren a dark glare when they cast him an apologetic look on his way past.

The communications expert snickered into his hand as the two of them passed the lobby of the Station, confident in the knowledge that if Rook wasn't where she was supposed to be then she was with Blue. Casting an equally dark glower behind him at his partner, Smokescreen shoved open the door to the Chief's office, and the both of them paused in the doorway, trying to decide if they were relieved or horrified.

It seemed that Warcry had beat them to reporting in.

Onyx glared up at them, and the two Enforcers standing in his office door winced as they took a seat to wait for the call to be over. "Is there any reason why this information was kept from me?"

Neither Blaster nor Smokescreen could see the vid screen, but they could recall the expression that went with the patient tone the tank was using. They had heard it a few times in Iacon before they had left. "It was decided that, to keep the civilian bots from panicking at the sight of us, that very few bots would be told. Smokescreen and Blaster were brought in because one of my soldiers, the one you know as Rook, knows them rather well and vouched for their character."

The dark blue Enforcer rubbed his forehelm, cursing under his intakes. "So this Rook, which would be the gray painted femme I met not a few megacycles ago, is one of your soldiers. _What_ kind of soldier?"

"Saboteur," Warcry chuckled wryly at the exasperated expression shot at him through the vid call, "one of my all around sneaky soldiers. Don't blame your officers for keeping it from you, we told them to."

"That's not encouraging." The Station Chief cradled his helm in his hands, in an effort to beat back the processor ache starting behind his optics.

"Fine then, Ultra Magnus told them not to spread it around." The SPARTAN-Bots' CO gave a broad grin in return for the dirty glare shot at him from two cities away. "It's an Autobot secured secret, and they would appreciate it if you could keep anything about Rook from hitting the news vids."

Onyx blew out a steady stream out of his vents. "Yes, sir. Appreciate the helms up before your soldier lands a cluster frag in my lap."

Smokescreen nearly choked at the easy acceptance, wondering just what had gone on before their arrival to make the older mech so giving. Obviously, the worst of the conversation had already passed before the two Enforcers had managed to get back.

Warcry nodded sharply at him as he leaned back from the camera that was transmitting his image to the Enforcer Station in Praxus. "You're getting backup in the form of a Wrecker and another SPARTAN, my tracker, with in a joor. I'll also see about prying loose another SPARTAN, my combat engineer that's supposed to be close to your city as well. Rook's already located the bots that have this Bluestreak mech, and is standing by. She won't interfere without direct orders from you to do so, or a threat to this mech. Follow to pick up your mech, then leave the clean up to them. Iacon out."

The glow from the vid screen on the Station Chief's desk cut out, and Onyx lifted his helm and shifted his glare to the two Enforcers squirming in the chairs in front of him.

"Care to add anything before we go hunting for your lost 'ex-thief' and brother?" From the grated out question, both knew they were in some serious trouble.

"There was no reason to inform you against the advice of the Autobots. Rook was just living here as a just in case as a private citizen simply living in the city." Smokescreen suppressed the jerks in his door-wings, even as Blaster fidgeted silently next to him.

"In case of what?" The dark blue mech thumped his fists on his desk, still glaring at them both. "Why do we have a soldier, who reports to the Autobots, keeping an optic on us? We're a fragging Neutral City, they should have kept their operations out of this city. That is _why_ we're Neutral."

"Not us, sir. Decepticons." Blaster glanced from his partner to his Station Chief and back again. "She's been on the trail of a Decepticon called Swindle lately, tracking his movements through the city. In case of emergencies, we can call her and a few of the others up to bolster our ranks if they attack the city like they did to Kalis."

Onyx glare shifted from one to the other and he glowered at the both of them equally. "Decepticons are not necessarily criminal. There are lawful Decepticons in the city, and profiling is against our laws. I will not have any bot going after a faction of bots in the city just because of some unsavory _political_ connections."

Smokescreen sighed, and pulled out a data crystal from his subspace and handed it over.

"Rook knows that, and she passes the bits of illegal activities she comes across to us when she can get it by legal methods." He nodded to the crystal that the older mech popped into his terminal. "That holds everything that she has on Swindle and his connections here, just in case her methods were ever questioned."

The Station Chief was silent as he read the information, a steadily growing scowl on his faceplate. It was clear that this evidence wasn't going to be improving his mood any. When he reached the end of the files on the crystal, he shifted his glare from the vid screen to the two before him. "Now that you've irritated me by dumping this on me _now_ , care to tell me why it is you're only giving this to me after I talked to this Warcry mech?"

"Would you believe us if we came in without any information to back us up and told you everything that Warcry just told you? He's an Autobot who works with Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus, we're just two of your Enforcers." Rubbing the arms of the chair he was sitting in, Blaster gave the Station Chief an apologetic half-smile. "Rook has him under observation, and we don't have enough bots to detail an Enforcer to watch him around the clock when Rook can watch him and keep up her front teaching self-defense at the same time."

Onyx grimaced as he got up from his chair. "I don't want to know how she can do that, or even how she found your brother's attackers. I want this slagged up cycle over with, as fast as we can."

The older mech started out of his office, beckoning for the two officers to follow him out.

"Your Warcry mech told me that you can now get to Rook through her internal comm, so get her location and let's go."

(ooo000ooo)

Rook carefully stepped around a mech she vaguely recalled as one of the pick pockets that Goldbolt employed and slipped into the holding cell that Bluestreak's attackers had set up. As the door locked behind her she ignored the distracted femme on guard duty, who was more interested in polishing her armor than watching the mech she had been tasked with guarding, and picked a silent path to Blue's side.

The merchant had not onlined since she had caught up to him, but he had been tied up and roughly thrown into the tiny room without stirring, and his lack of movement was starting to worry the saboteur. She was contemplating calling up Refit and letting the little medic jack into her systems like the tracker had to check over the merchant while she waited for him to wake up, when the mech beat her to the punch and started to stir.

The groan the Praxian mech gave alerted his guard to his condition, and she simply sneered in his direction as he propped himself up and warily looked around at his new location. Bluestreak pushed himself to the corner without a word, worrying the saboteur even more as he did so.

All three of them spent the next few joors silently, only broken by two comm calls to Rook's internal comms. She spent the time in a cramped position in the only unoccupied corner of the room, studying the room and what little it had to work with.

The saboteur wasn't surprised that after three joors of nothing, the so called guard finally left the little room they were using as a cell. She swung to her pedes and carefully crept over to the merchant, inspecting what she could see of the cables binding his hands together under his door-wing joints.

The door suddenly opened, letting in three mechs and Bluestreak jerked backwards in response, barely missing the nearly invisible saboteur hiding in the same room with the tip his door-wings.

"So, you're up." The lead mech smirked at the bound merchant, leaning back against the wall as the two other mechs with him took up positions flanking him. "Care to guess why you're here?"

Rook glared at all of them, but was distracted from her irritation momentarily by a comm from her sister, who had just entered the slums and needed directions to her.

Bluestreak's optics flicked from one mech to the other warily. "Because I'm the brother of an Enforcer?"

"Close, but no." The mech on the left snickered, and slid closer to the merchant. "You're here because you hang out with that femme that's been interfering in our work too much."

The Praxian blinked blankly at him as he combed through his memory banks for a femme, and could only think of one femme in his company frequently that fit the bill. "You mean Rook? Why do you hate my teacher?"

The femme in question hesitated at the merchant's side, calculating the likelihood that she would remain hidden if she interposed her frame between the younger Praxian and his aggressors. She _knew_ she couldn't, her optical camouflage would distort the image of the merchant too much to be ignored, but she crept forward as far as she could anyways.

The mech leaning against the wall laughed, and both the femme and the bound mech winced at the rusty sound. "Cause she's been poking around too much, taking out our fellow thieves and disrupting our supply lines with her heavy handed presence. So we're going to rough you up, offline you, and dump your frame on her doorstep as a warning."

He pushed off the wall and started towards the Praxian mech, who shrank back against the far wall.

Rook had enough of listening to them, and sent a quick comm to Holdout and her mech about the situation before she shifted from her spot next to Bluestreak. The mech in the lead had a grin on his faceplate, stalking forward as the merchant fetched up completely against the wall. As the mech drew back a fist to start, the saboteur interposed her frame in front of her student and caught the mech's arm as he swung.

The confused expression lasted all of an astrosecond, when Rook's stealth systems tried and failed to compensate for the mech's paint, causing the system to crash with a few dying flickers.

The SPARTAN frowned at all three of them, still holding onto the first mech's wrist.

"This was in extremely bad taste, mechs." She cast a glance back to her student, who was looking more than just a little frightened but very happy to see her. "Cover your optics or something, Blue. This is going to get _very_ violent."

Nodding, the merchant ducked his helm and stared at his lap. The saboteur turned her attention back to the suddenly apprehensive mechs before her with a wicked smirk. "Try not to scream too loudly. I don't want to attract attention."

The mech in her grip scowled and tried to kick her as he yanked at his held arm in a bid for freedom. Rook twisted to the side so the mech's kick impacted on her well armored lower chassis and not her more vulnerable hip joint, yanking back on the arm in her grip and pulling off the limb with the force of her turn.

She used the dismembered arm assembly as a club to take out the mech she had ripped it off of, bashing in his helm and tossing the left hand mech the arm as she turned on the right one. He had tried to rush her as she dealt with the first one, the left had hesitated out of surprise, and the femme pulled her rifle out from her subspace before he reached her. She clubbed him over the helm, then jumped over his falling frame to the last one, ramming him into the wall and getting one hand up to jerk out a few well-placed wires before he could try to hit her.

She removed the same ones from the frame twitching on the floor before she left the unknown mech to kneel down next to Bluestreak. "Blue? Are you alright?"

"I… I don't know." The merchant kept his optics on his lap even as the saboteur leaned over him to get at the cables securing his hands. "They… Rook, why do they not like you?"

The femme gave a sigh as she worked the knot loose. "Cause like they said, Blue, I've been a nail in their tires for the last few stellar cycles. Keeping some of the bum bots from being easy prey, kicking their afts when they come after me, and not stopping when they threaten me."

She jerked the cables another few times and the knot loosened enough for the merchant to work his hands free.

Bluestreak looked up, flinched from the sight of fluid stains on the walls and the floor and the rather dark glare shot at him from the last mech still online, who was slumped against the wall and unable to move, and resolved to keep his optics on his teacher. "Now what? They won't just let us walk out of here, Rook. They're going to attack us, and I'm nowhere near as good as you are at fighting, and I'll hold you back. I don't want to wait here, not with those three in here as well, and… and-"

"Blue, slow down." The SPARTAN femme gripped the mech's shoulder joints and smiled. If it happened to be a bit strained around the edges, the merchant didn't happen to notice. "I'm not going to leave you here alone, and it should be a few joors before any bot comes in to check on the mechs' progress. We have time, we just need to wait until either your brother or my sister get here to help. Okay?"

With a stuttering sigh, the merchant nodded franticly.

"Can… uh, can you get rid of them? O-or rather, just move them elsewhere?" He flicked a quick glance to the shattered frame of the first mech and back to the femme before him. "Please?"

(ooo000ooo)

Galeforce met up with Holdout and Sandstorm at the edges of Praxus' slums, irritated and annoyed by the terse comm message the CO had given him on his way to Yuss to back up Quickgrip. The combat engineer nodded to the other mech as he gave his sister a long look. "War' said you'd fill me in on what we're doing. Care to start with where Rook is?"

The tracker gave him a distracted smile as she hurried past, optics locked on the streets, fitting the saboteur's directions to the map of the slums she had also sent along. "Rook's with Bluestreak, one of Prowl's brothers that happened to be kidnapped… spark-napped, whatever. We're just backup and the cleaning crew. But Ro' had to interfere with the attackers to keep her mech alive, and we're running out of time before they discover that she's there. She's not trained to deal with hostage situations, and she'll be overwhelmed if she is where she thinks she is and gets rushed."

Galeforce's vocalizer emitted a startled click as she passed him. He followed along in her wake hurriedly, step in step with the Wrecker mech she had brought with. He tilted his helm at her back as he processed what he had been told. "Where does Rook _think_ she is?"

"The headquarters of some wanna be slum lord, who would have a fair sized number of bots to throw at her until she gets flattened by either the number of the mechs or trying to do something she has next to no experience with, watching another's back plates in a fight. You know Ro' prefers to work and fight alone, and then we really only work with each other or other soldiers when we have to." Holdout glared at a gaggle of slum bots that were out and about, making them scatter and decide to take another street to their destinations.

"Ah." The SPARTAN mech followed along silently as the three of them strolled deeper into the slums of the city. After a while, he glanced to the other mech following the tracker. "So, how have you been?"

The Wrecker, with a broad grin stretching his faceplate, turned his helm to look at the other mech. "Fantastically well."

Galeforce cast a quick glance to his sister's back. "Er… okay, then."

The mech paused mid step and wondered why it was he felt like he was tagging along with on another couple's date, then figured that he didn't want to think about it too hard as he followed them both further into the city.

(ooo000ooo)

Smokescreen grimaced over at the bronze and black femme he had only met once as she walked up to him with two mechs at her heels. "Holdout, right? I take it you're the one that helped Rook locate my brother?"

"Got it in one, mech." The femme grinned at him as she gave Blaster a nod, a mech she vaguely recalled from Iacon hanging around Rook. "Take it you're her Smokey and Blaster?"

He glowered at the nickname coming from some bot other than his younger brother or Rook. " _Yes_ , that would be us. I prefer Smokescreen."

"That's nice. 'storm, that building over there." The femme pointed for the Autobot Wrecker behind her and he nodded with a grin as he diverted to where she gestured. She looked around at the decrepit building they were all standing around in, and smirked at the two Enforcers as Galeforce wandered around, poking at the structure's weaker points. "Who told you about this place? It's almost perfect."

Smokescreen huffed and responded shortly as he watched the Wrecker stroll around the building. "Rook did."

The SPARTAN saboteur had taken a megacycle after bringing them back from Iacon to show the diversionary tactician the unmonitored paths to a few locations around the city that she used to get from one point to another under his various sensors and informants. She had used that to bribe the Enforcer to come along with her without asking too many questions before they left Praxus for Iacon.

After they had left the office of the Station Chief, the Praxian had then showed Onyx the routes that she had showed him to keep the bots in the slum from seeing them coming, and had taken them in order to get closer to the building the saboteur had transmitted to Blaster as her current location.

The route they had used ended into an abandoned building that was a few collapsed floors from being condemned; and the Enforcers tasked for this mission, Smokescreen, Blaster, Nightbeat, Siren, and Onyx himself with a number of SWAT bots, were all watching the building that the tracker pointed out to Sandstorm.

Blaster blinked at the large mech's back, and leaned over to the other mech, one who he was sure was another SPARTAN, as he disappeared around the side. "Who's he?"

"Sandstorm. An Autobot Wrecker, and Hold's main mech." Galeforce muttered in answer as he grinned at the rather stunned expression on the communications expert's faceplate as he got closer. "He's alright, for some bot that's not a SPARTAN."

"High praise." Smokescreen muttered sourly as he watched the other mech curiously. He had only caught the end of the other mech's comment.

The combat engineer snorted at that understatement, and switched the topic to the situation at hand. "So, your Bluestreak and our Rook are in a tiny room near the top of that building. She said she already took out three mechs that were going to kill Blue, and they're waiting for us to make a distraction so they can get out."

With another grimace, the diversionary tactician scowled harder at the building that the tracker had pointed out. "So what are we waiting for?"

Both Galeforce and Holdout grinned at him without answering. Onyx was about to repeat the question irritably, still uncertain about these SPARTAN bots that were invading his city, when a number of bots suddenly got tossed out the front door and the Wrecker that had tagged along appeared in the now open doorway. "Front room's clear!"

Both SPARTANs bolted for the open door without another word, the femme paused to kiss her mech before following the pale green and gray mech father inside. The Wrecker, Sandstorm, grinned even more as he followed the two in again.

Smokescreen shot a mildly confused look to Blaster, who shrugged and simply said, "They're dating."

"Holdout and… wow." The Praxian Enforcer groaned as he followed the three to the building. "That's… mildly disturbing."

The communications expert merely snickered at him.

Stopping near the open door to stare at the number of bots that the Wrecker had tossed out of the building, Onyx glanced back once to get Nightbeat and Siren to start securing them and dragging them with them to hide inside of the same building they had been hiding out in.

A few of the SWAT Enforcers started to assist as the rest of them took up positions around the building to catch any bots that tried to leave before the SPARTANs were done with whatever they wanted to do.

(ooo000ooo)

Rook watched the doorway, casing a few glances back to Bluestreak's quiet frame in between watching the hallways for movement. The merchant had stopped talking after she had dragged the three mechs, or rather two and a shattered frame, out of the room, and while the lack of chatter could be contributed to the fact that Rook had just killed a bot in front of him, she was worried that it had more to do with him being spark-napped because of her.

She sighed as retreated to the corner that the Praxian had huddled into and crouched down. "Blue? Our siblings are here, and they're starting to clear out the building now. We're going to be moving shortly. Are you sure you're okay?"

Bluestreak jerked upright, out of his slouched position with a few cracks, blinking at her. "Y-yes. I just… I-I don't think I like this."

"Well, that's okay, Blue. I'm not going to be offended." She gave him a wan grin as she tugged him up. "Just stay behind me, or Holdout or Galeforce, and you won't have to fight."

He nodded and followed after her to the door.

Rook paused in the hall, looking both directions before taking off to the right, leading the Praxian to the stairwell she had followed his attackers up. She could pick up some scrambled transmissions that referred to some attack on the first floor, figured that was where Hold' and Gale' where at, and cautiously started her way down with Bluestreak tripping down after her.

The saboteur winced at the noise he made, and held up a hand half way down to keep the merchant higher on the stairs as she moved father down and peeked around the rails to ensure the second floor landing was clear.

To her disgust, it wasn't.

There were six bots, four mechs and two femmes, milling around the stair well, but their concentration was on the stairs leading to the first floor and not in her direction, due to the kick up the other SPARTANs and Wrecker were making. Rook silently retraced her steps and leaned in close to the Praxian nervously waiting for her.

"There are a few bots between us and the others. I'm going to go clear them out, I need you to stay here." She waited until he nodded at her, but when she turned to go, he grabbed her arm.

"What-t do I do if they attack me?" Bluestreak's door-wings flapped rapidly as he stared at her. "I-I'm not that g-good of a fighter."

"Blue, that really is unlikely to happen. I already searched out the third floor when I… uh, dragged off those three earlier, and I'm going to clear out the ones on the second floor landing as the others take care of the first floor and the basement." Rook grimaced, and cast another look at the third floor, unwilling to place any confidence in her quick sweep earlier. "If it does happen, shout. I'm just going to be down the stairs, and I'll be back real quick, I swear."

He winced at the thought of being alone, but nodded again and let her go.

The saboteur gave him one last glance back, before activating her stealth system and smirking at his startled gasp as she disappeared from his sight. Sneaking back down, she inspected the six in order to decide who she would start with. Two had their backs to her, another was on the step leading to the first floor. The other three were watching the back of the one peering down the stairwell.

Figuring that she may as well work her way from the back to the front, she deactivated her stealth system a moment before she launched herself at the two before her, tackling the left one and wrenching his helm around as she was rolling off the frame and into the cluster of three on the other side of the landing.

The startled shout from the second mech as he caught what had gone on out of the corner of his optics drew the attention of the other four, a moment too late for the mech closer to the saboteur when she regained her balance, if not her pedes. She rolled into him and kicked upwards, connecting her left pede to his lower chassis and shoving him back into the other two, causing all three of them to fall backwards as she turned to deal with the last two still standing.

By the time she was back up on her pedes, they had gotten close enough to her to start swinging. The first mech to reach her, the second one that had been on the stairs as she came down, lunged forward in an attempt to pin her down by grabbing onto her legs. Rook twisted to the side to avoid that, and nearly ended up connecting with the fist of the second mech that had been on the steps down. Snapping up a hand, she shoved the incoming fist to the side as she stepped forward and slammed her helm up into his. As that mech fell back, she wrenched around and grabbed the off-balanced mech and wrenched his helm off before he could straighten up.

Releasing him, she turned to the two that had scrambled past the mech she had kicked. The two femmes lunged at the same time, taking Rook to the floor before she could move to evade them. With one femme pinning her pedes to the floor and the other trying to rip out the cables in her neck, Rook punched up her hand and gripped the femme before her by the jaw plate, using her extra strength and pulling her down to smash her helm into the floor. Bucking her hip joints up, she rolled the other femme off as she bodily ripped the first one out of the floor and threw her into the wall.

Still sitting on the floor, she turned her chassis enough to see the last mech had recovered enough balance to stumble back and kick out at her. Before the kick could connect, the saboteur rolled to the side, under his leg and up to her knee joints, only to blink as the mech's helm disappeared in a shower of sparks and oil spurts with a crack of a weapon's discharge.

Sandstorm, the Wrecker mech that Holdout had taken up with, stepped past the frame now slumping down on the floor and aimed his oversized rifle at the last femme online and pulled the trigger again. The mech gave her a jaunty smile as he extended a hand to help her up. "Rook, right? Where's this Blue mech we're here for?"

"Up a bit more." The saboteur took the proffered hand with a matching grin to the one the mech wore as he hauled her up. "Take it you and Hold are having fun?"

"He's two ahead of me." The tracker in question gave her sister a mock glower as she scaled the stairs in the mech's wake. "Grab your mech and get down stairs as we finish clearing this floor out."

Rook gave her a salute as she turned back to the stair case, and the two entered the second floor. She bolted up to where she left the merchant. Bluestreak gave her a wide opticed look as she came into view again. "It's okay, we're good to leave now. Ready to get out of here?"

He nodded rapidly as he stumbled down to her.

(ooo000ooo)

Smokescreen nearly tackled Bluestreak in a spinal column cracking hug as Rook guided him into the main room of the first floor. The SPARTAN saboteur exchanged grins with Galeforce as the Enforcers looked over the poor merchant.

Onyx glared at the sharp grin that the gray femme shot his way before taking her leave with the other mech. "I still really don't like this."

Blaster gave the Station Chief a timid grin as he spoke up. "Well, we did agree to stay out in return for SPARTAN type help."

He simply glowered back at him. "Not like we had any choice in the matter. You don't say no to a mech that highly placed in the Prime's confidence."

"That generally means they know more about this situation than we do." Smokescreen suggested as a peace offering while steering his shaken brother to the doorway. "Given what they tend to omit from anything they do get around to talking about, this may just end up being some kind of gang nest they know about but we don't."

"Something like that, anyways." The diversionary tactician froze in place when the new vocalizer sounded, tugging the younger Praxian to a halt in the middle of the room. The red and gold mech in the way gave the three Enforcers a slightly forced grin. "Excuse me, but can you tell me which direction Rook wandered off to?"

Blaster inspected the new comer suspiciously. "How the frag did you get past the mechs outside?"

Jackknife's grin got a bit wider. "Trade secret. Rook?"

Pointing the way, Onyx scrutinized the mech as he walked past. After he had passed through the room and disappeared down the same direction the two SPARTANs had less than a quarter of a breem beforehand, he pinned his officers with another suspicious glare. "Who the slag was that?"

To his surprise, it was the merchant mech that spoke up.

"He's living with Rook at the moment, and sometimes watches the classes she teaches." Bluestreak peered up to the set expression on his brother's faceplate. "What was he doing here?"

Smokescreen pulled the other Praxian out of the building and pass the SWAT mechs standing around before he admitted lowly, "My guess about this place being a gang hideout might be truer than I thought."

Blaster politely waited for Onyx to pass him out of the building before peeling out and chasing after the Praxian brothers. The Station Chief glowered at the three's backs, as he crossed his arms over his chest plates and waited for the SPARTANs to leave the building so he could send in his own bots and mop up whatever was left.

\V/

Galeforce and Rook made their way through the basement of the building, taking out the occasional bot that crossed their path almost as an afterthought. The basement held more space than any normal building plan allowed, it was almost twice as vast as the plans for the building had on its official floor plans.

The saboteur wasn't surprised, but the combat engineer kept looking around with an irritated expression the father they went. "That was such a bad idea it's not even funny. Do you know what kind of risks these processor blank idiots ran in carving this all out?"

"Not really, nor do I think they care." Rook punched the wall lightly as the two filed past another computer terminal set up in a largish room, the sound flushed out another femme hiding under some equipment. Jerking her thumb joint behind her to get the other femme moving, the saboteur continued to answer her brother's question. "It's an old trick, manually carving out more space underground. It's almost expected when dealing with the less than legal."

The gray and green mech snorted, still glaring at the obviously inept excavations that had expanded the underground rooms way too far for internal stability as the two of them let themselves into the last room that they had to clear out, ignoring the last femme scrambling her way out of the basement behind them.

Rook smirked at the mech the two of them found, who was desperately searching through his contacts to find more bots that owed him something to throw at the bots invading his territory. " _Hel-lo_ Goldbolt! How are you this cycle, mech?"

The gaudily painted mech whirled around, gave a horrified screech at the sight of the two of them and tried to press his frame through the bare rock at the back of what looked to be his office.

Rook grinned at him, ignoring Galeforce's odd look at her for the cheerful greeting. "Oh, don't be that way. You wanted me here right? Oh! Guess what? I brought some friends with me, wanna meet them?"

Looking between the two bots standing in his office, Goldbolt started, unsurprisingly to the two SPARTANs, to whine and beg for his continued function. "Y-you! I-I… you can't-t, take whatever you want! J-just let me live!"

The combat engineer smirked at his sister. "You have some bot for this, right?"

Flourishing a hand behind her, the saboteur stepped to the side and a red and gold mech walked into view.

"I'm here like you said." Jackknife gave the pale green and gray mech an odd look before returning his attention to the gray femme. "Didn't think you really could pull this off with so little."

Rook sniffed in his direction even as Goldbolt quailed against the opposite wall. "Oh ye of little faith, really now. I can do damn near everything I say I can."

Galeforce laughed and edged pass them.

"I'll leave you two," he paused and looked back at the gold and silver mech at the back of the office, "three, of you alone. See you outside, Ro'."

Before Jackknife could take even take a step in the direction of the slum lord in the back, the saboteur took a blocking step in front of him and gave him a hard look. "This gets you off my back plates, right? If I give you him?"

Patting her on the shoulder joint, the underground thieves' enforcer started to corner the whimpering Goldbolt into a corner. "I'll put in a good word for you. Promise."

Rook laughed as she followed after her brother. "I'll meet you at the stairs when you're done."

\V/

When Galeforce and Rook finally emerged from the building with the red and gold mech tagging along behind them, a surly Onyx and his SWAT Enforces moved into the cleared structure, apprehending the still functioning but out of it survivors.

Holdout and Sandstorm were waiting for the three of them at the same building that the Enforcer had used to stake out the nest, both grinning widely.

The tracker waved at the other two SPARTANs, ignoring the odd look the latest mech that had been added to the saboteur's posse gave her and Sandstorm. "So, you ready for that round of high grade you owe me yet?"

"Yeah, yeah." Rook gave the bronze and black femme a hug. "We'll hook up with Smokey and Blast, see if Blue is feeling better yet, and get overcharged before you three have to leave. Sound good?"

"You know me so well, it's almost like you're family." Holdout grinned at her, before casting a glance over at the still silent mech staring at all of them then looking back at the gray femme in her arms. "Take it we can't crash with you?"

The saboteur gave Jackknife a quick look of her own before smirking back at her sister. "Naw, you can if you don't mind some neighbors."

Snorting, the red and gold mech shook his helm. "I got to check in and spread some news, so I won't be there this off-cycle. Sides, I don't think hanging around with you is good for my health, seeing how you deal with bots that cross you."

"Aww, that makes me so sad." Rook purred at him as she moved from Holdout's grip to drape herself over Galeforce's shoulder joints, much to the combat engineer's visible disgust. "You sure you don't want to hang around for one last cube before you go?"

The green and gray mech pushed the femme off of him. "I'm going to get in a decent amount of recharge in while I can, so I'll pass on the bar hopping."

He gave the other two SPARTANs a nod as he walked off towards the warehouse that the saboteur lived and worked out of.

Jackknife shook his helm, turned around, and started off in the opposite direction at a fast clip. Holdout watched him go before smirking at Rook as they started down the streets themselves. "I think you scare him."

"That was the point. He'll keep any other bots from getting assigned to me out of concern of what I'll do to them, and then I just only have to worry about him poking around." The ex-thief cast a grin back to her. "You've been quiet, Sandstorm. What're you thinking?"

The Wrecker mech grinned back at her. "I'm thinking I'm looking forward to later this cycle." He dodged the shove the bronze and black femme aimed his way.

\V/

To Rook's pleasant surprise, Bluestreak was present at the oil bar they normally met up at after class. She introduced Holdout and Sandstorm to the two Enforcers and the merchant properly, since all five of them really hadn't talked to each other in Iacon, since all of them had been a bit distracted.

"Smokey, Blast, Blue, this is my… uh, sister, Holdout and her main mech Sandstorm. Hold, 'storm, the two Enforcers are Smokescreen and Blaster, a diversionary tactician and a communications expert respectively, and Bluestreak here is a merchant." She looked down at the cassettes that were milling about the table the four Praxus mechs had corralled. "And um… Steeljaw, Ramhorn, Eject, and Rewind are the cassettes."

The tracker gave the cassettes a respectful nod, then tugged her mech to the bar. "Come on, 'storm. Let's get started on that promised overcharge while these four… uh eight, talk."

Rook gave the Enforcers an apologetic grin as she took the remaining seat.

"I owe her a drink for helping me in the middle of her work shift." Settling into the chair, she gave Blue her full attention. "Seriously, Bluestreak. Are you okay?"

The merchant gave her a timid grin over his own cube of energon. "I think I need a few more classes. I really couldn't do much when those bots attacked me but get knocked around."

"Blue…" The saboteur groaned and rubbed her helm. "I don't think even we could have done something different in the same situation. Nitro, our brother in Simfur, had something similar happen to him, but he had only two gunning for him at that, which was easier than four at the same time."

Smokescreen glowered at that bit of news. "Terrific, any more news that you care to share about your… siblings?"

"Not really." She cast him a grin and patted the younger Praxian's hands before grabbing the cube the Enforcers had already ordered for her. "So, with that done and over with, what's the damage with your boss?"

"I think he suspected something about you, but nothing of what you really are." Blaster fiddled with his cube as the ex-thief's attention switched to him. "He's really not happy with either us or you at the moment. Think you may end up with a permanent detail of Enforcers following you around for the next few stellar cycles."

"To borrow Smokey's phrase, terrific." Rook gave all of them a wry grin over her cube. "At least the next vorn will prove to be… interesting, for a lack of a better word."


	21. Chapter 21

"This, right here." The smallest seeker of the SPARTAN trine pointed to a section of the graph displayed by a vid screen that trine mates and the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots were peering at over his wing plates.

Tigerstripe studied the spot intently, trying to see what it was that Spotter was trying to show them. Unfortunately, his normal cycle routine made it harder than normal to pick out what the other seeker was trying to draw attention to, due to what was nearly unheard of in a SPARTAN, exhaustion. "I don't see slag, Spot'. What are we supposed to be looking for?"

Markmaker simply leaned back, giving the vid screen a distrustful look from next to the larger seeker. He really didn't want expend the processor power to try and piece together whatever it was that the slighter seeker had called them all in to see, so he kept silent at the back of the room.

The recon scout rolled his optics at the seeker framed heavy weapons specialist's comment and the tank framed assault specialist's silence, before looking to his trine leader, the last hope he had for any bot else to understand what he called them into his room for. "Well?"

"I see it. This means the anti-virus that the XO ordered from you works, right?" Drawing his claw down the _almost_ dipping point on Spotter's nearly obsessive kept charts of Enforcer activity that included seekers, Drax gave a grim smirk when the two heavier built SPARTANs stared at him in incomprehension. "The rates of seeker involved violence has leveled out over the last decacycle, and Spot's showing us what could be the start of the dip in reported altercations throughout the city."

The Enforcer crammed into the tiny room Spotter had assigned to him in the Aero Space Division Headquarters winced at that pointed dig aimed towards him, and glowered at the assault specialist. There had recently been an issue with one seeker mech that had successfully avoided being implicated in two assault cases dealing with ground bound bots, only the new Air Commander's connections in the seeker community let the tank put together what had been going on in time to keep attack number three from happening.

Irritable over his new responsibilities or not, there really was only one reason why the darkly painted seeker was being so surly for the last few megacycles. "If your still torqued that Shadow' traded you from the Covert Ops team to War's Front-Liner team in exchange for those new twins, stop taking it out on me. The only thing I can do this far away is tell you embarrassing stories about Shadow's early… planetary cycles back on Onyx."

Spotter's helm shot up in obvious interest, craning his neck cables around to stare at the 2IC, mentally willing more to come out of his vocalizer since all of the class IIIs were all rather mute about how well they knew each other. Tigerstripe suddenly acted like he found something on the half ceiling over helm very interesting as he rubbed a clawed hand over his mouth components to keep from laughing, and Drax finally cracked an honest looking smirk at the tank after a few megacycles straight of being rather surly to every bot. "Frag you."

The news of the roster changes had reached the four of them in Vos by the same method. Shadowdancer had called over the tactical up-link to both Markmaker and the trine leader to inform them of the changes she and Warcry had agreed to, partly because it was respectful to inform the Second in Command of significant changes in the unit and partly because it did deal with Drax personally.

To say the Covert Ops assault specialist was less than pleased with the personnel shift was putting it mildly. He got the cold logic of it, Shadow' had pointed out that having only one Covert Ops seeker in the trine was only going to be a useful feature once in a great while did make a lot of sense.

However Drax had put in a lot of effort into his Covert Ops training and skills. He was also rather proud of how well he kept up with those skills and being shifted back to an advisory position in the team of subterfuge specialists rankled… even with understanding the reason for it.

When the news came down, the newly promoted Air Commander made polite to his old commanding officer, got off the up-link as fast as he could and went out to get overcharged not a breem after the conversation had taken place, skipping an appointment with Hailstorm in the process. It had taken both Tigerstripe and Markmaker, with Spotter and a rather bemused Dawnglider running interference for them, to keep the luckily pensive drunk from passing out anywhere else but his new berth at Headquarters.

After that particular incident, which ended with the SPARTAN Enforcer owing the pretty seeker femme a favor or two for her help, Drax had kept his thoughts of the unit's internal shuffle to himself. His trine mates had assumed that if it was ever stated out loud, whatever the trine leader's thoughts about it was, it would probably be comparable to the effects of corrosive acid on organic material.

He considered it, he really did, but Drax finally shook his helm at the other mechs. "She'd know it was you in under a breem of one of us saying something stupid, wipe all of our memory cores in the most painful way she can think up to destroy the information, and then infect us with a particularly nasty virus or two. But thanks for the offer."

Spotter ducked his helm back to his work with a snort and an irritated rev of his turbines. "Yeah, but the idea of it was intriguing for a moment there."

"Up until Shadow' finally gets around to kicking our collective afts, even if she's two cities away." Markmaker remarked with a grin. He clapped the smaller seeker on the back, avoiding the wing joints, and gave the Air Commander a mock salute as he turned to leave the room. "I've got a patrol to do, mechs, so I'll see you all later."

Drax scowled after him, but turned back to his trine mates before the tank even reached the door. "Good news and bad news, 'stripes. Good news is, this means you can stop expanding your off-cycle patrol shifts. Bad news is, we can't scale you back on them until Spot's ratings go down."

"Figured that." The aerial tank had a tired but wry smirk stretching his mouth components even before the darker painted seeker had finished. "With the power draws of those late flights, I'll still be more than useless for these early joors, unless you need some bot to simply stand in one spot and frighten the seekerlings. I'll make a great statue, I promise."

Snickering under his intakes, the silver seeker tilted back in his chair enough to peer up at both of his taller trine mates.

"I would pay good credits _just_ to see that." He righted himself in time to miss a swipe from Tigerstripe, still grinning as he turned his chair to see the larger seeker storm off. "Well that was fun. What's next on our agenda, oh so brilliant leader?"

Drax managed to flick one of Spotter's antennas before the recon scout could pull back far enough to avoid it. "I've got that probably incredibly boring meeting to go to in a joor. Want to come with?"

"Naw, I function simply to know you suffer." The slimmer SPARTAN shot back in retaliation for the flick to his helm protrusions. "Sides, I need to do a bit more digging through the _ATHENS_ ' data banks sometime this cycle, a bit of a favor for Knightblade and the rest of the CPU super squad in Crystal City."

"Perfect." Drax drawled out as he turned to leave, ignoring Spotter's soft snickers at his expense.

(ooo000ooo)

The new Air Commander glared his way through the few obligatory meetings with several well respected seekers who had concerns about his competence for the post he had recently been officially 'promoted' to.

He managed to keep from scaring the Pits out of the seekerlings Hailstorm had paraded before him for some reason or another; inspected the regulations that passed for the aerial defense plans in case of 'alien' attack without making too many sarcastic comments on the pointlessness of planning only for a purely metallic based sentient attack while ignoring an organic one; and finished half of his first cycle taking up his new duties by getting a cube of mid-grade with Lightning.

Who was laughing at him as he griped out loud in the berth room he had been assigned.

Drax cradled his helm in his claws, ignoring the cube sitting next to his elbow joints on the table between them as he sat across from the green and gold mech.

"You are no slagging help. I thought it was your _function_ to train the fragging Air Commanders. What do I get? Trine mates that bickers near constantly, a trio of ground bound commanding officers who don't care what I get up to as long as I can respond to any emergency situation that pops up, and a…" He lifted his helm briefly to peer at the other seeker for a moment before dropping his helm down again. "Unhelpful _whatever_ the frag you are."

Lightning simply grinned over at the younger mech, not even bothering to appear apologetic about the accusation pointed towards him. "Just cause I'm the mech that trained the last Air Commander, doesn't mean I'll bend over backwards to smooth out _your_ way. I kinda enjoy watching you struggle."

The assault specialist grumbled and growled under his intakes about rusty old mechs and their twisted views of assistance, but had to concede the point. He had killed the other mech's student, and he was being rather diplomatic about the whole thing, ignoring the rather rocky start a few stellar cycles ago. The fact that he _could_ go to him with the numerous questions he built up in a cycle was a blessing in and of itself, given what the relationship between the two could have been like.

"I thought command would be easier than missions in another galaxy with next to no Intel. If you had told me that most military outfits run off pure data work before we got here, I wouldn't have believed you." Pulling up his helm and swiping up the cube he had been ignoring with an irritated turbine rev, Drax scowled at the shaking wing plates of the mech across from him. "And what the frag is so funny? I could use a laugh after a cycle like this."

"Do you always whine like this?" Lightning grinned broadly at the disgusted glare he got.

The Air Commander muttered his reply into his cube and ignored him for the rest of their mid-cycle break.

\V/

Tigerstripe reappeared halfway through the next meeting with a few scientist types, scaring the slag out of one of the research assistants when he popped up without a sound behind him. It was the first and only thing the Air Commander had found amusing since Markmaker's offer to inform him of Shadowdancer's early function screw ups.

Drax blinked to himself when the phrasing of that last mental thought rang a bit off to him.

As the much larger SPARTAN seeker took up a position behind him, the Air Commander tuned out the spiel he was supposed to be listening to. Spotter normally handled the tech and scientific stuff with a few frequent calls placed to Knightblade and he could always get the slimmer seeker to dumb the information down for him later. Instead he concentrated on a program that Knightblade and Perceptor had written up for 'just in case any of you feel something is off'.

It took him all of the next joor to figure it out, staring blankly at whoever it was talking to him while his processors are occupied with the program. The sudden scowl he acquires when he realizes _what_ threw him off about his earlier thought finishes the work Tigerstripe started by his arrival, the same assistant who had started so badly at the massive seeker's arrival gave a squeak as something in his helm shorted out with a curl of smoke and a crackle of energy.

Both Drax and his silently looming trine mate stare down at the crashed seeker, Hailstorm peering at him almost as if the femme really couldn't believe that had occurred. She looked up at the two SPARTANs apologetically as one of the two senior scientists rushed for a medic and the other tries to figure out if he could continue the explanation without assistance from the others. "Maybe we should postpone this meeting until later in the cycle, sir."

"Next cycle, please." The Air Commander sighed, raising one clawed hand and rubbing at his aching helm. An undesired side effect of the diagnostic program he had just ran on himself, he was sure. He twitched his other claw at the seeker behind him before turning and leaving the room without waiting for an answer from either quarter.

Tigerstripe gave the older femme a half-sparked salute before rushing after him. "Sorry 'bout that, Hail'. Something has been bothering him… uh, lately."

"It's fine," she muttered to herself even as he rushed out, still slightly stunned after the unusually terse response Drax had given her.

(ooo000ooo)

He caught up to his trine leader only when the older mech reached the empty stretch of land the _ATHENS_ was parked on, well outside of Vos' city limits. Drax gave him a quick backwards look before sending the short range signal to open a hole in the ship's shields and stepping through. "How torqued is Hail'?"

"She's more surprised that she finally got a glimpse of that temper we've been telling her about." Pretending innocence when the Air Commander glared back at him, Tigerstripe tried to unobtrusively inspect Drax as if he could spot whatever it was that was bothering him. " _So_ … you going to tell me what lit a fire under your turbines earlier or do I have to get Spotter and pry it out of you with a crowbar?"

The darker painted seeker snorted harshly in response, stomping up the open cargo ramp without a word. Undeterred, Tigerstripe followed after him. It hadn't been a negative, and after a vorn of functioning with the surly Covert Ops assault specialist, he knew that meant the other SPARTAN was in the middle of trying to figure out how he wanted to phrase what was wrong.

Spotter looked up in surprise when the two of them reached the bridge, but put down the datapad he had been working on at the first glimpse of his trine leader. "Well, this will be pleasant."

Drax pointed a claw at him. "Shut up."

He moved his arm to point at his other trine mate.

"Sit down."

He glowered at the both of them until the recon scout shut his mouth components and the heavy weapons specialist sat in the indicated chair, then slumped into the seat normally reserved for the commanding officer of the ship.

" _Fuck_ it." The twin jerks of shock from his trine mates amused him in a distinctly dark twist of ill-humor, but the Air Commander suppressed the twitch that tried to become a smirk. "Have you two noticed anything about your thought processes being a bit… _off_?"

"Thought? What does that…" Blinking at his trine leader as he processed that question, the slimmer seeker trailed off as he caught on to what the other SPARTAN was saying. "You mean to tell me you're only _now_ noticing we're starting to process- _think_ like them? It's been almost a vorn, eighty and some human years, I'll calculate it out later for you if you want, of function- _living_ here with only Cybertronians around us. It was bound to happen even if we're a little more than stubborn to give up even trace amounts of our past. The patch I wrote up in the beginning was really only a temporary fix until we started conforming."

Drax rolled his optics in irritation. "I've spent more than a little time around the psychologically trained among us, Spot'. Keep in your CPU that mainly means our dear XO, and she doesn't let us go off without a very terse brief about what may happen. Not what I'm talking about. Call up two memory files, one about any subject from our past and the file in question, process it a little bit, and then tell me what stands out."

He crossed his arms over his cockpit, glaring at the both of them as they complied. Spotter with clear skepticism and Tigerstripe in pure confusion. He knew exactly when the recon scout figures out what he's referring to when he jerked backwards, smacking his wing plates on the back of his chair.

Spotter hissed as he leaned forward in response to the abuse he had just inflicted on himself, thanking everything he would not say out loud for the quirks of Cybertronian physiology that means that they no longer have mussels to strain or joints to realign on the occasions that they have been leaning over a console for way too long.

That on top of what he just did to himself would have been enough to wrangle an embarrassing yelp from him. He's had to deal with that more time than he cared to count, more noticeably the last time he felt that was when he was programming Refit's AI cube. "Okay, I get it. Don't know when it started, I wasn't looking, but you know it could have been when we started on-lining here."

"What started?" Tigerstripe looked from one to the other, confused beyond measure.

"Our memory files have been rewritten."

" _Or_ they were always like this, and we never noticed." The recon scout hastened to add when the larger seeker seemed to flinch at the flat statement from their trine leader. "It really could have been anything, and…"

He trailed off again before casting the darker seeker a wide opticed look.

"I _really_ need to talk to Knight' sometime this cycle?"

With a snort, the Air Commander pins the slimmer seeker in place with a glare. "I've got memory files of pulling up other memory files, and now those are phrased different in older files than what it tells me when I pull them up again. They've been rewritten."

Opening his mouth components to argue, he was going to cite lack of information, Spotter shut them again with a click as Drax gave him an _'argue-and-I-kick-your-afterburners-hard'_ glare. He looked to Tigerstripe instead, who looked more than a little panicked at the conversation topic, then let his helm fall into his hands.

"Or they might be in the process of _being_ rewritten," he admits sourly, even as his processors ran over the information in his memory banks, trying to find either a pattern to the information changes or a rate of change from his oldest files.

After about a breem of silence; while Spotter is still going through his memory banks file by file, Drax was simply glaring as usual, and Tigerstripe is a few more sentences from giving up trying to understand what his trine mates are talking about and leaving for his patrol shift tailing around Markmaker; the slimmer recon scout shoved himself up to his pedes and stomps over to a innocently blinking terminal.

He had noticed the larger seeker's confusion and came to the conclusion that whatever was going on was more advanced with him than himself or their trine leader. "Do you recall when I made a copy of your processes to figure out how to write the blocks, 'stripes?"

"Uh… yeah?"

Spotter nodded and beckoned him over to the view screen. "Some of your memory files are still in the _ATHENS_ ' memory banks, compare them to the ones you have right now."

Getting up to see what the recon scout was talking about, the heavy weapons specialist waited as the slimmer seeker flitted around him, setting up whatever it was he wanted to show him. It took less than a breem, and the file, which was recorded right after he had onlined and kicked his way out of the unresponsive Cryo-Stasis Tank, had a few things that didn't match up to the file in his memory banks.

It was the file of 341 slapping 046 on the back of the helm for staring at her aft after the abortive attempt to talk to Wheeljack on the bridge. She had huffed with annoyance, made a crack about the CO's wandering attention, and then 046 had sent 196 out after the inventor to ensure that he really was going to do what he had said he was going to.

In Tigerstripe's memory files, the ones that he had carried up to this point in his memory banks, there were no added remarks in sub coding that recorded his thoughts on the matter. In the file on the view screen, there was the transcript about a conversation he had about what the word 'aft' was supposed to refer to with the XO. Everything else was the same, small notations and other recordings exactly the same down to the punctuation, just a few minor facts replaced or obscured, like the time stamp being changed from the humans' calendar notations to the count down like clock of a Cybertronian time notation.

It was the creepiest thing Tigerstripe had ever seen in his entire function. He couldn't recall if he had made those changes with intent or not. "That… why don't-I can't… ah."

"Look, 'stripes. Just go on patrol, and in the mean time we'll see if Spotter and Knightblade can figure this one out after we get back." Drax had walked up behind his trine mates and took the larger seeker by the shoulder joints to steer him away from the computer banks. He wasn't sure if Spotter could fix them if the heavy weapons specialist got spooked any more. "Wait a little bit, and for frag's sake, don't panic."

The Air Commander shoved the larger seeker out of the bridge, and cast a quick look to the recon scout still standing at the computer banks before walking out of the ship with Tigerstripe. The larger seeker gave the darker one a half amused, half annoyed glare in return, even as he continued to walk. "Not panicking, thanks. Just… very confused."

"Tell me about it." Drax blew out a sigh from his vents as the two made their way out of the ship and down the cargo ramp. "If it wasn't for Markmaker's comment before he left, I highly doubt I would have picked up on this. His mention of the XO's prior experiences on Onyx was what tipped me off. I normally think of our human experiences in _human_ terms, but the whole linguistic shift we've adopted in case of Cybertronian eavesdroppers made it harder than it… had to be."

They were nearing the edge of the _ATHENS_ ' shields when the Air Commander trailed off, staring at the shimmering field in front of them. The heavy weapon's specialist twisted around in time to see the confused expression stamped on his trine leader's faceplate as he came to a stop. "What?"

"Did you close up the shields? I didn't-" Drax shut his mouth components sharply, and Tigerstripe shifted uneasily as they both accessed the records of the ship to see if Spotter had.

The recon scout's digital signature was missing from the last order to seal the breach in the shields.

"Well… that's not creepy at all." The larger seeker observed wryly, even as he sent his signal to open the breach again. "You sure Spot' didn't-"

Drax cut him off sharply as he started moving again. "There is no automatic subroutine set to close the shields after a specific amount of time."

"Sure there's not. There must be _another_ logical explanation as to why slag like this keeps happening."

"Shut up, 'stripes." The grimace on the Air Commander's lip plates made the larger seeker rethink the acceptability of his next comment. "Get going, I've got personnel meetings in less than half a joor, unless you want to come with."

"I'm good. Have fun, Drax." Tigerstripe clapped the slightly shorter seeker on the shoulder joint before taking off, not looking back as the Air Commander stares thoughtfully at the _ATHENS_ ' shields, or rather the breach that could be seen.

\V/

Hailstorm's smile of greeting was a bit off, as she welcomed the next group of seekers that had come in from other cities to meet with the new Air Commander. "I'm sorry, gentle mechs and femmes, but I have no idea when the Air Commander will be back from his conference with his trine. If you would like to wait, there is – Drax!"

The seeker mech that stopped at the femme's shout was an odd looking one. Painted black and dark blue, with an alt mode that seemed to have more curves than angles to it, he looked like he massed more than any of the bots standing around waiting to meet him.

As the mech changed course and got closer to the group, the more tech orientated seekers, who tended to have frames that were smaller than average, in the meeting hall of the Aero Space Division backed up.

Hailstorm came up to the mech's shoulder joints, but the physical intimidation of the dark seeker looming above her didn't seem to register to the Council Member as she beamed up to him. "I didn't think you would be back so soon. Where are your trine mates?"

"Spot's got some research to finish up, and 'stripes is out helping the Enforcers this shift." The seeker drawled as he looked over the clustered group of seekers that he was supposed to meet with. "Are these the groups from Gygax and Tyger Pax?"

It didn't seem possible, but Hailstorm's beaming smile increased in wattage as she nodded in approval. "Yes, do you have time or is there another-?"

"I'm good for this now. Got all of the other miscellaneous meetings out of the way before mid-cycle." Pausing as he seemed to contemplate the group before him, the Air Commander gave the femme a half-smile before starting to walk off. "On second thought, I need a cube before we start. Set them up in the main conference room, I'll be there in a breem."

Still smiling widely, Hailstorm herded the group of seekers into the room the large seeker had asked for. The last two seekers through the door, if her roster of visitors this cycle was accurate, and since Dawnglider was the one who wrote it up she was sure it was, were two of the five sent in from Gygax.

Her roster listed them as Thundercracker and Skywarp, and they were here with Thrust, Ramjet, and Dirge. She approached the two with a hesitant smile, wondering what had happened to their third.

Skywarp caught her approach, and reassured her with a quick grin, easily guessing what the femme had headed in their direction for. "No deactivation to report, ma'am. Our last trine member is holding the fort down back at Gygax."

"Ah, well that's good." Hailstorm's smile returned to her grin. "I don't think I have your third on file yet. I would be pleased to correct that now if you would like."

Thundercracker, who was leaning against the wall next to his trine mate, gave the femme a shake of his helm. "We'll get it sorted out after the meeting, ma'am. Don't worry so much."

"I function to worry." She teased, but gave them another smile and left off as the dark painted seeker they had seen in the halls walked in, cube in his claws.

The meeting was pretty routine, a simple meet and greet to get to know the new Air Commander. It was only made unusual by the lack of the mech's trine, and by the fact the mech seemed to know something about the five from Gygax already.

Thundercracker grinned at the dark seeker across the conference table, Drax simply gave him a knowing smirk back.

Skywarp leaned over to his trine mate to keep from being overheard. "He knows, doesn't he?"

"Looks like it."

The warping capable seeker snickered to himself as he leaned back to continue watching the odd seeker that was the Air Commander. "This will be interesting. Apparently he's not as thick chipped as Screamer seems to think. Wonder _what_ he knows?"

"The question should be who has he got in Gygax to inform him?" The purple and black seeker quipped back, inspecting the mech who was answering some question of the trine leader from Tyger Pax. "Lord Megatron banks his strategy on the city being completely committed to the Decepticon cause, and some bot apparently isn't all that loyal, even with the blockade outside of the city."

\V/

Axel scowled up at the ceiling. He had been locked in the same bare, and rather depressing, room for the last few joors, awaiting the so called 'pleasure' of a personal interview with the Decepticon scientist Shockwave to personally report about what he had seen of the SPARTANs so far.

Not that any of the bots in the complex knew what the bots he had been hired to capture and/or kill called themselves, but it was more of the point of things that kept the bounty hunter on edge.

Keelhaul, the miss happened mech that nearly attacked him, had all but dragged the bounty hunter out of Simfur's slums and out into the flat expanse of wasteland that made up the south west hemisphere of Cybertron. With literately nothing around to provide cover for any Praxian mechs that happened to be invested in the proceedings of this mockery of an interrogation, Axel had firmly squashed the idea that Nitro had decided to tail them to the Decepticons' base after all.

Giving the bounty hunter the sinking feeling in his spark that he had been tossed to the proverbial junkyard without even the courtesy of a lead reinforced safety line that could get him out in case this idea of theirs' got him in trouble.

After nearly a solid megacycle of wandering around the barren expanses outside the city, following the mech his contact had told him to follow, the two had arrived at what amounted to a very large hole in the ground. Axel's disbelief must have shown on his faceplate, because Keelhaul had snickered just before he had roughly shoved him into said hole.

After he got back on his pedes and managed to look around, he found that the interior was very different than the outside suggested.

If Axel had been pressed to say, he would have said it was closer to what Iacon's Autobot base would have looked like if it had been built underground, and for a significantly lesser amount of bots.

He had landed in a heap within what looked like a steel cell without a ceiling, which hadn't been too far from the truth. Some green painted mech had opened the door, asked him curtly for his name and then dragged him off through the underground streets to a building that all of the bots in the tunnels seemed to be avoiding.

That same mech he had talked to over the public comm unit peered up at him from behind the desk that he seemed welded to, expressed some trite greeting in his direction with a marked lack of enthusiasm, and dismissed the green mech that had brought him in.

Axel had been handed a data pad and told to fill it out with what observations about the strange bots that he had.

That had taken all of a joor, and when he handed it back, dearly hoping that filling out data work was the only thing he was here for, he had his delusional dream smashed by being informed he had to wait around until Shockwave could get to reading what he had brought in and he had to wait in the building just in case the scientist had more questions for him.

Which had led to the bounty hunter's current predicament, staring at a ceiling with the intent to deactivate himself through boredom before any uncomfortable interviews could be conducted.

It wasn't much of a surprise to him that his half-sparked plan wasn't working as well as he hoped it would.

Rook had approached him and Nitro in Iacon before they had left in regards to what he was supposed to tell any Decepticons that asked about the bots. The gray femme had waltzed into the small rec room nearest the hangar after he had the unfortunate experience of meeting their XO in person, and the saboteur had spent little time on pleasantries before launching into the information they couldn't copy to any external devices in case some bot managed to pick through his subspace pockets. Running through the personal facts and half-truths she had given him only ate up a little time, seeing as they were pretending that he had been on the run for most of the time he had been not reporting back to the contact given to him.

With a frustrated sigh, Axel started to push himself up into a sitting position, intending to pace a little to work off the bad case of twitchy synapses he had, only to freeze in place when the door suddenly opened and a blur of a tan and gray bot spun into the room and slammed the door behind him.

A rather dusty and rust streaked Nitro gave the gaping bounty hunter a disgusted look even as he balanced carefully to keep his weight off his door-wings and their joints while sliding down from the door to sit on the floor.

"Do you know how hard it was to keep you and that misshapen mech that brought you here in my sight in the middle of a desert? Never mind the difficulties navigating the truly insane layout of this fragging rust heap?" The demolitions specialist shuddered theatrically and fully leaned back against the closed door, giving the still staring mech a bemused look as he tried to brush off the dirt crusted to his armor. "What?"

"I… you're-" Axel blinked at the Praxian gazing levelly back at him, unable to figure out how the SPARTAN had come to be sitting in his little cell room when he was sure the other mech had been nowhere around when he had arrived. He eventually gave up and settled for a, "What took you so long!"

"Security around this place is tighter than I counted on. I needed time to work around everything without giving the element of surprise away," Nitro replied with a wicked grin, "and that's a very interesting way to sit."

The bounty hunter sputtered at the other mech's cheek, but finally hoisted himself fully upright on his berth. Inspecting the nonchalant Praxian sitting across the room as if this was a normal berth room and not a mockup of a prison cell, Axel gritted his dental plates as his processor ran through everything that could go wrong if the mech was spotted sitting around anywhere near him. "For Primus' sake, get out! I'm fine, for what your concern is worth."

An almost hurt expression crossed the SPARTAN's faceplate, but that was offset by the hilarity that twitched the mech's lip plates up even as he tried for a serious expression.

"If you insist. By the by, your meeting is in two breems." With another half-afted salute, the demolitions specialist pried the door open again and slipped out without even a backwards glance.

The bounty hunter ran his hand down his own faceplate in exasperation. He was of the firm opinion that the mech needed a sparkling sitter, and he _wasn't_ going to volunteer for that.

\V/

Quickgrip twisted the arm of the bot before him behind his'... or her, back to keep the bot from escaping the narrow alley he and his SPARTAN brother had ducked into to catch the group of bots tailing after Blurr. He really couldn't tell if it was a mech or a femme, which was more than a little disturbing to the ex-human soldier, but it seemed that Galeforce had no such problems reading the bots' builds.

The combat engineer gave the two he had trapped against a wall a wide, evil looking grin as he leaned in to them, one arm braced across one mech's throat cables and his hand gripping the upper chest plates of the other. "It's your unlucky cycle, mechs! Either you leave the speedy bot you've been tracking alone, or we'll come back and rip the wires out of you until you're little more than rusting slag left like junk on the streets. But for right now, we're going to knock the cogs out of you as a little warning."

The bot in the close-quarter combat specialist's grips hissed at the gray and green mech, still trying to wiggle out of the other SPARTAN's firm hold. "I'm a femme, you stupid lugnut!"

"Really?" Galeforce blinked at her as he took another look at her frame, scowling at her bulky armor upgrades that made it so hard to tell. "Well, _damn_. You are. Sorry about that."

He looked up at his brother, who gave him a shrug as if to say, 'who cares?'

"You know, if you downgraded your armor to a medium weight, I would be able to tell that at first glance."

Quickgrip thought the stuttering sound that emitted itself from her vocalizer was the strangest thing he had heard all off-cycle.

He would have sworn she was a mech as well.

(ooo000ooo)

Less than three breems later, they relocated themselves to an apartment looking out over Blurr's living flat. The combat engineer wandered over to his brother and handed a pre-sealed cube of the _ATHENS_ ' energon to him as they both sat on the balcony.

They had established this little routine cycles ago, meeting up before one would go for a recharge cycle while the other took that off-cycle's watch to swap everything from observations that amused them to theories on how to proceed. They had been doing this ever since the combat specialist had returned to the city from Iacon, and the other from the slight emergency call from Praxus, and starting to try to get closer to Blurr without making the other data courier panic about possible Decepticons trying to get to him through the guild hall.

"You know, this would go so much faster if you told the mech that we're… or rather, _you're,_ working for the Autobots and he needs to beef up his security measures before some bot hurts him."

"You think I haven't considered that option?" Quickgrip cracked the cube open and poured about an eighth of it down his throat cables. "You've got the same information Shadowdancer and Xenon gave me about the mentality and habits of bots in similar positions like his. We can't do anything until he gets less jumpy around me, or he's going to do a runner and I don't think either of us wants to try _catching_ that mech."

Galeforce grimaced as he toyed with the rim his own cube, still looking over at the apartment they were watching. "True. But something's gotta give soon. That was the fourth group tailing him ever since I've gotten here. That's more than just idle interest in him, and we may not have the luxury of waiting until he's comfortable with you personally to tell him what's going on."

The close-quarters combat specialist blew out a sigh from his vents and lowered his cube to glare at the SPARTAN next to him. "I'll try talking to him next shift I share with him, and sound out how flexible he is mentally at the moment. Happy?"

"Ecstatic."

They both let the silence drag on with the comfort of two soldiers that had done mind, or processor, numbing duties before, still watching the other data courier's living unit for any sign of trouble.

Eventually, the gray and green mech put down his now half empty cube and turned to look at his brother with a raised optic ridge. "You know, this may be classified as stalking. Or at least, something else that would be equally embarrassing to admit in polite or mixed company."

With a strangled sounding snicker, Quickgrip let his helm fall back into the wall he was leaning against, his cube left sitting next to his right knee joint. He just knew this wasn't going anywhere good, but pure curiosity made him keep quiet to see where the other SPARTAN was going to end with his line of thought.

"Or at the very least, an interesting story to tell the others the next time we see each other. _'What did you do for the last vorn?'_ " Galeforce mimicked the CO's vocalizer well enough that the other SPARTAN emitted another strangled sound and tried desperately to keep from bursting out laughing. "Well, sir. We stalked poor Blurr into a spark attack, and then we dragged his aft back to base after half a vorn of watching his routine every fragging cycle. That about covers it. Nothing else to report, sir."

"Oh, shut it." The slate gray and black mech took a half-sparked swipe at his brother's helm, still snickering, but he missed by a bare inch as the pale green and gray mech jerked away just in time.

The combat engineer snickered himself as he picked up his cube again, raising it to take a sip and check Blurr's living unit again. He caught sight of a massive shift of the shadows draped across the roof of the building they were watching, and slowly lowered the cube as he shifted his optic settings to a low light level in order to see what was going on. "You know that promise to talk to Blurr you gave me?"

"Yeah?"

"You may have to talk to him sooner than that. We've got movement. A lot of it."

Quickgrip's helm snapped up, catching sight of what the other SPARTAN was watching. A number of bots seemed intent on the same balcony that they were watching.

Luckily for the two SPARTANs, they had less training in anything resembling covert operations tactics and were doing an abysmal job of keeping a low profile to the roof in order to keep from being spotted by any bot that happened to look over in their general direction. He uttered a curse as he got to his pedes, thinking over what they could possibly do from this position.

"Slag it all… Do you think if I asked politely, would he believe me enough to meet up elsewhere if I call him up now?"

Galeforce stared at him blankly for a moment, optic ridge raised at the question.

"Yeah, I didn't think that would work either." The combat specialist drew in what would have been a bracing breath if he had still been human, then let it out and vaulted onto his railing in order to swing himself up to the roof of his own apartment building. "This is going to suck."

"Hope he buys a shoddy explanation of late cycle building repairs, 'cause I don't see us getting around making a lot of noise."

"Mute it."

\V/

"I'm bored."

Clearsight ignored the one half of the twin pair of soldiers the SPARTANs had acquired from the Autobots lounging around her sitting room, burying herself deeper in the data file she had filched from work for a bit of light reading.

The silver swordmech was not bothered by being blatantly ignored by the scout, they had a bit of tradition of where the twins would do something annoying and get ignored outside of the time the SPARTAN femme put into teaching them the ropes of what they were to know now that they were a part of the unit. Instead he repeated the same phrase he had been repeating for the last two joors in a louder tone, trying to get her attention.

"I'm bored!"

"That's nice, Swipes."

Pouting at the predictable response, the silver mech crossed his arms over his chest plates turned his attention to the ceiling.

Sunstreaker had some kind of test of his stealth capabilities this cycle, something that Sideswipe had completed a few megacycles before, and his gold twin was out shadowing some other bot for a few joors around the city and wouldn't be back for a while. With his brother missing in action, his training for the cycle done and very little to do in the city, Sideswipe was what he considered _criminally_ bored.

When they had first gotten to Ankmoor with Clearsight, the twins had very little time to be anything but exhausted cycle after cycle _again_ as the scout had put them through their paces to see what skills they had and which ones she needed to teach them. It took her all of a decacycle to find out what they were proficient in and which skills they were lacking, then the SPARTAN femme had turned her attention to polishing old skills and instructing them in new ones, with the occasional time or two spent on making the two unlearn bad habits.

It, the swordmech had to admit, had been instructional in the extreme, learning the 'ropes' that the SPARTANs had apparently been shown in a different galaxy.

He and his brother had also managed to get a few random stories out of the rather soft spoken femme every now and again as well, mostly about the other class-II SPARTANs that Clearsight had worked with before the _ATHENS_ had been refitted for them. Like the story about Drax and an a incident dealing with an ill-timed exploding Banshee and two Grunts that managed to hold him hostage for a few minutes, that apparently was the most embarrassing thing to happen to the seeker mech that was now the Air Commander for Vos.

Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had snickered like younglings when she had told them, and she laughed a bit herself as she got to the point where Spotter, who at the time had been on the mission docket as technical support and not a field agent, had to go out and rescue him.

The silver swordmech shifted on the scout's couch, twisting to lie down and resume his idle staring in a more comfortable position for his neck cables.

From what Clearsight had told them, they were nearing the end of their training stint with her, and they would be going on to where Rook was stationed for Sideswipe's extra training in everything a saboteur needed to know. He was torn between wanting to get out to Praxus, the city was called the center of culture on Cybertron for a reason and he was looking forward to finding out what that was, and perversely wanting to stay.

Nothing against Clearsight's city but Ankmoor was as boring as her job, leaving very little other than the actual reason they were here for a distraction. It left the silver mech way too much time to process. On the other servo Ankmoor was probably the first place he could say he enjoyed his time in, seeing as not only were they taught something that had multiple uses, but also had some bot that either could or would _not_ get irritated with them for the odd occasion of stupid slag they got into.

Neither mech actually had any decent amount of time to themselves for reflecting on their functions before training under Clearsight, seeing as they were normally either out and about for the Autobots or knee joint deep in planning their next prank against either superior officers or fellow soldiers that had slighted them in some way. Then, when they had pressed Warcry into accepting them to his unit, they had been too busy again with the 'basic' training the three SPARTAN mechs at Iacon had beaten into them.

Before that, they had been shuffled from base to base when their latest units tired of dealing with them and their pranks, making the more easily recallable vorns nothing but a long blur of extensive travel and new sights and bots. And then before that, they had been two gladiators in the underground gladiator matches in Vos.

That line of processing made the sprawled out swordmech scowl, and he ripped his processor from the memory files of that rather depressing time with a barely muffled groan. Swinging himself upright, and catching sight of the bemused look on the SPARTAN scout's faceplate as she looked up at the sound he had made, Sideswipe made for the main door of the femme's flat. Intending on getting out before Clearsight asked any questions, but the scout's front entrance slide open before he reached it.

Sunstreaker gave him a confused look as he practically threw something small and metallic at the femme still sitting with a data pad. "What?"

With the SPARTAN distracted by the item she held in her hand, the silver twin shook his helm and made a motion to relay his desire to get out of the flat. The melee specialist flattened his lip plates in agreement, and gave the still distracted femme a backwards wave.

"We're going out."

"You two leave next cycle." The twins stopped cold and looked back at her, completely confused. She grinned at their expressions. "I've got nothing else to teach you, according to our lovely XO, so you're going on to Praxus and Rook. Did I forget to mention that?"

Sideswipe snorted at her faux innocent expression. "Sure did."

She shrugged with a small smile playing across her lip plates. "It was… a pleasure, mechs. Enjoy the rest of your cycle."

\V/

Titan pulled a face at his superior as the bot explained, in excruciating detail, what was going to happen to him in a decacycle's time. The slightly smaller built mech simply grinned back at him, wildly amused at the white and black SWAT Enforcer's petulant expression. "You can either do this voluntarily or wait for some orders to be cut, but you're the mech we selected for this. So start thinking about what you want to do."

"But-" the SPARTAN whined, not at all happy with what his boss had informed him that he was going to do, "I'm not any good with younglings! My cohort sister won't even let me _hold_ her bitlit. That should tell you all you need to know about my skills with younger bots."

With a shrug, the Captain of the SWAT team kicked up his pedes on his desk and laced his finger joints over his chassis. "That's not my problem. Every vorn we do this, and each time we throw one of the team on the proverbial bomb. This vorn, since your new, it's your problem."

Titan's faceplate contorted to an expression of excessive pain, as he imagined explaining what Enforcers do each orn to about forty to fifty little bots just like Kynaite. He shuddered in horror as he recalled how much trouble Kynaite and Silverbell had caused in Iacon, and then added that to the image already in his CPU.

The resulting expression of horrified reluctance, complete with a tick in his left optic, had his Captain laughing so hard he fell out of his chair with a ringing clash of metal on metal. The SPARTAN rubbed his faceplate as he started his way out of his superior's office. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, sir."

A few more wheezes escaped the older Enforcer's vents as he pulled himself up using his desk. "Oh, relax Titan. It won't be that bad."

"Easy for you to say, sir. How long has it been since you did something like this?"

"Oh... at least ten or so vorns." Resettling himself in the chair, the Captain grinned good naturedly at the white and black SWAT Enforcer looming in his doorway. "But I do get to read all the reports, and the younglings generally are well behaved during any visit by Enforcers."

Titan gave his superior an old fashioned look for that before letting himself out of the other mech's office. Rubbing the back of his helm, he ignored the few snickers going around at his expense and tried to think of what in the Pit he was supposed to do with a Cybertronian career cycle for younglings.

He had never been to one himself, seeing as every SPARTAN had their careers more or less picked for them, and he wasn't sure if admitting that would make some of the other bots he worked with suspicious of him and his past or not. Stuck between a self-made hard place and a rock of responsibility, he did the only thing he could think of and sent a request to his younger sister for a chat.

Shadowdancer broke down laughing at him as well when he explained his problem to her later that cycle. The sight of the wildly laughing tactical officer was disturbing to the anti-armor assault specialist, to say the least.

The tiny image of the Praxian femme snorted back a few more laughs at his expression, bent over what he assumed was some sort of desk she worked at in Gygax. "I'm sorry, Titan. Really I am. But… the look on your faceplate!"

"Yeah, yeah. Real funny, Shadow'." He warily inspected the femme in his view screen, trying to figure out if the laughing was a sign of the universe crashing or simply a warning that the XO desperately needed a vacation. "Help, please?"

"Right." The grin she wore sill unnerved the other SPARTAN, but it seemed like the femme had cracked down on her own amusement at his predicament and adopted a more serious expression. "Well, you have a few avenues to explore. How much time do you have for this?"

"Chief said about a decacycle, and I would think he's going to check it out before he lets me represent the Enforcers to the impressionable new CPUs, so a handful of megacycles, I think."

Something pulled Shadowdancer's attention to the left of the view screen, and her optics flickered a bit before snapping back to him.

"I suggest getting a hold of Clearsight and asking about the event in question. You could ask the others to ask their own civilian contacts about their own experiences as younglings, if it applies, so you'll have a general idea about what's expected of you." She brought her claws together over her desk, frowning thoughtfully. "You could also ask the Autobots."

Titan waved a hand at that suggestion, dismissing it. "Be a bit embarrassing to ask, wouldn't it? I thought those of you who act as our brass were trying to avoid letting those bots know just how restrictive our developing stellar cycles… _years_ , were."

"We are." The XO sighed, rubbing at the base of her chevrons as she fought back another processor ache. "That was why I said 'could'. But I can safely guess Jazz has himself convinced that we were conscripted against our will, and if he caught that, then one of the others probably has the same suspicions as well."

She frowned harder, and then locked optics with him.

"Why not ask around your station? They would have to know you don't know the standing operational procedures for Tyger Pax, since you just moved there… was it a vorn ago already?"

"Yep, we're getting downright ancient." The white and black SWAT Enforcer grinned at her image and waggled his optic ridges, causing the Praxian to scowl back. "Thanks for the ideas, Shadow'. You're a doll."

"Yeah, whatever. Have fun with the bitlits, Ti'."

The SWAT Enforcer reached for the switch that would let him terminate the connection, but frowned himself when it seemed like the femme had been distracted again. That was unusual, as he had never seen the XO so scattered before. Not that he had ever worked with the class-III tactician before they had onlined on Cybertron, but she had seemed well organized every time he saw her. "Are you okay, Shadow'? I think that's the second time you've let your processor wander off."

Frowning at him, Shadowdancer visibly hesitated before relaxing a bit back in her chair. "It's nothing really. Just an issue I'm not at all sure how to handle. Is it really that obvious?"

"Naw, I'm just concerned 'cause I haven't seen you in a while." Titan decided to keep his view on her need for a vacation to himself, and classified it as an act of self-preservation. "Nice paint job, by the way. Very… uh, shiny."

She scowled at him harder and flicked out one clawed hand to show off said shiny new paint. "You can thank Zephyr for that. She all but dragged me to an old friend of hers and left me at his mercy for a fragging joor."

He raised an optic ridge at that. "Not a good experience then?"

"Well, it's not that. Getting repainted was actually a rather nice sensation." Shadowdancer sighed and propped her helm on her other hand. "It was just a little unnerving, because the mech she took me to spotted right away that it was a military paint job, then expounded on the 'hazards' of walking around like that"

He snickered at the femme's uses of sarcasm.

"I can't decide if it was his horror over a less than exacting job done on me, or my own uneasiness that some other bot could spot it if he did so fast that's bothering me."

"And so you worry for the rest of us, despite the fact we've been here without such issues of needing new paint for at least a vorn."

Her optics narrowed at that, and even with the distance between them at the moment, Titan leaned back as if bracing himself for a reprimand. "That's my job. Tactics, remember? Besides, it's going to happen sometime."

"Nothing good comes from borrowing trouble, sister dear. Or rather, little sister." He grinned at the disgusted look she shot him. "Right, well, I'm going to stop procrastinating. Get off your aft and get back to work."

She snorted at that, giving him a wryly respectful look. "That may be the first time I've heard that directed to me since Onyx. I applaud the titanium bolts it took to say that to me."

Titan grinned even wider. "Does that mean you won't hit me when you see me again in base metals?"

Shadowdancer snorted and reached for the kill button on her external comm. "Not likely."


	22. Chapter 22

Knightblade frowned at the data pad shoved under her olfactory sensor. Wheeljack, who had done the shoving in question, even wiggled it before her to gain even more of the sniper's attention away from her own work. "Wanna guess what this is?"

"That dissertation on alternate alloys for Cybertronian construction you wanted to propose to the scientific council, using the unique elements myself and the rest of my unit are built out of?" She snatched the pad away from the overly excited inventor and held it steady so she could actually read what he had displayed on it. "Oh..."

"Yes, ' _oh_ '." Wheeljack grinned at her slightly surprised expression as she read over the data. "Not my thesis. I figured out how that last strange system of yours works, and the files are ready for Ratchet to look at."

The SPARTAN sniper hummed happily as she read it over. It was the most comprehensive overview at the converted bots' systems that had been done, including the work she and Galeforce had been able to put in before the SPARTANs left Iacon the first time.

Wheeljack had taken to the idea of finally mapping out every system Knightblade had with unnerving enthusiasm, in her own opinion. He and Perceptor had taken several of her systems apart in order to study how they worked; found and fixed several minor issues that had been ignored by the sniper; streamlined her frame even more than it had already been; and compiled it all into the file she was now picking through.

She decided that the minor amounts of pain and discomfort she had lived through these last few decacycles had been worth it, given what this would mean to the two new mechs that the Covert Ops bots had picked up. It hadn't been discussed with any amount of detail, but the general feeling was that if Knightblade and her two mechs couldn't find a way to replicate the stealth systems then Sideswipe and Sunstreaker would be at a very bad disadvantage when finally deployed.

Happily, she pinged Shadowdancer's comm with a message about the completion of the files as she set down the data pad and impulsively hugged the mech standing next to her seat. "This is fantastic, 'jack! This will really help out, thanks."

"There are a few notes you might want to go over, as some of them are upgrades for some of your systems." He patted her on the back awkwardly as she let go of him, not all together sure about how to respond to the unexpected action of the femme. "Like a refinement of your shielding. We still have no idea how you bots generate the energy you do, but there are ways to ensure that the shields don't short out so quickly."

That had been a bit of a sore point between the scientist, inventor, and the sniper during their look through the SPARTAN's systems. Knightblade refused to let them study her generator style spark chamber, believing that it might prove too dangerous to open up. Wheeljack and Perceptor had tried on numerous occasions to change her stubborn processors about the risks, but the argument had ended when the she took up ignoring them when they asked about it, and they had to drop the issue.

Her lip plates quirked down into a brief frown, but she was too happy with the results to quibble over the details of how complete the file was. She was of the opinion that some things just had to be left alone, the issue of SPARTAN-Bots and sparks being one of them.

Finding out _if_ they actually had some was something that she didn't want to investigate.

With a negligible wave of one hand, she dismissed the topic as she turned back to her personal terminal to send it off to Warcry to give to Ratchet and Refit. "Whatever, 'jack. It's fine as it is. It's not like we can install the same thing for the twins, as we were apparently built like this."

Compressing the file and attaching it to a brief message to the two SPARTANs still in Iacon, she sent it off with a lingering feeling of relief. This meant that she would no longer have to suffer through having her systems taken apart.

Wheeljack considered arguing, discarded the idea as a lost cause, and took a seat on her desk.

"It was almost fun, if you discounted the pain you went through." Swinging his leg idly, he leaned back to regard the vaulted ceiling in Perceptor's lab. "Where is your other half?"

With a snort, as Perceptor's assistant/guard she had heard the same rumors about the reason she was so close to the scientist which included some of the rather wild ones that the inventor was slyly referring to, and pointed to the door that lead to the living quarters. "He's got something to do this cycle that he won't tell me about. Go bother him and report back with whatever it is."

"Will do." He pushed himself up and left the sniper to compose another reply to one of Perceptor's colleagues. With a brief discussion about who it was that was attempting to enter his quarters, Wheeljack entered the scientist's sole domain.

Perceptor himself was searching through his notes and greeted the inventor distractedly. "Wheeljack, to what do we owe the pleasant occasion of your companionship this cycle?"

"Finished compiling the work we did on Knight's systems and finally handed it off to her. Now I'm wondering what it is that you're doing." The green and white mech leaned against the wall and watched as the scientist discarded another data pad with a scowl.

"I became acquainted with Knightblade nigh a vorn ago presently, when she serendipitously reclaimed myself from a calamitous deactivation by an unpleasant unit of Decepticons." Perceptor discarded another pad and reached for the next one without pause. "I am endeavoring to review my written account of daily events to analyze when she formally became my adjunct, as it had occurred to me that such an occurrence of note should be celebrated."

Wheeljack blinked a few times as he sorted out what the other mech was trying to say in more words than he had to use. When it clicked, his vocalizer fins flashed and pulsed blue. "That's a great idea, Percy! But you know... I've never heard the complete story about how you two met. All I've heard was that she rescued you."

The scientist paused in reaching for the next pad, and slowly nodded to himself. "True. If you wish..."

"I'd love to hear it."

Placing the to be looked at pile of pads to one side and sorting the others that he had already looked through, Perceptor signaled to the inventor that he should take a seat. "As I have previously stated, I became acquainted with Knightblade nearly a vorn ago. That cycle, I was abducted from my residency and removed from the city proper, in a less than pleasant means, and was awaiting my captor's whim on what my ultimate fate was to be. When they had decided, and moved to short out my spark before using my inactivated framework to exhibit it as a macabre warning to any of my fellows that had the same individual positions about this conflict I myself held; a series of shots sounded and deactivated an indefinite quantity of my assailants, at least I presume so, my attention was in another direction at that specific instant in time. When I had wrestled my bound frame to investigate what had occurred, Knightblade was attending to the remainders of my attackers by hand, deactivating the last of them even as I observed. She then released my restraints and had intended to resume travelling to her objective, but I delayed her with a series of enquiries into her intent in the metropolis. While questioning her, it came about that she was looking for employment within the city, and given that she had endeavored to ensure that I was functioning in any capacity at all, I offered her a job in assisting my work and watching for any repeat attempts on my continuing function."

Wheeljack nodded after his customary moment of parsing through the speech like story. "So, you intend to celebrate the occasion where she killed a number of bots trying to kill you."

"When stated in that manner, a gesture of thanks seems almost uncaring for those unfortunates that found their demise that cycle."

"No, no. It's a good idea." He could almost feel his hidden lip plates trying to smile, but knew the scientist could be able to hear the amusement if he let them. "Just, you know. It seems a little odd, given how all of the SPARTANs acted that far back, that Knight' stopped to help out some random stranger on the road."

Perceptor blinked and tilted his helm as he considered what he knew of the sniper's considerably anti-social habits before he was aware of the SPARTANs' history and worked with the inventor in conditioning her out of the worst of it. "Indeed."

That far back, the SPARTAN femme could converse with any bot, and did when Perceptor needed her to, but any enquiries about her personally ended in some rather harsh comments about minding one's own business. She wasn't as bad now, she could carry on a small conversation about minor details of her function, but still grew guarded when the subject of her past employment, and anything related, came up.

"To answer that question, I was curious." With a broad grin, the femme in question leaned against the open doorway as she watched the guilty looks the two mechs gave her for speaking about her when she hadn't been present. "That particular cycle, I _almost_ didn't stop. I was achy and tired, but my training as a soldier wouldn't let me ignore the signs of an obvious struggle. Human soldiers were considered to be a type of Enforcers, and any Enforcer worth their metal wouldn't leave a bot in a bind like that. So I investigated, and the rest is history."

Recovering from the shock faster than the inventor, the older mech inclined his helm to her. "And I am eternally appreciative that you arrived in the opportune moment that you did."

"Quite. Show it by not hiding in your quarters. I can't 'assist' you if you do nothing all cycle."

Wheeljack snickered weakly. "What is there to protect him from in his own room?"

She arched an optic ridge at that comment. "Want a list? I've done some sniping when my targets where in their personal quarters before, and I can tell you every weak point of this place with my CPU at half-power. The others could probably tell you worse horror stories about the hits they've done."

"I do not believe that is necessary. I have accomplished what I desired to do, and I believe we have an investigation into volatile elements to complete for the miner's guild this megacycle." Perceptor ushered the both of them out of his room, closing the door behind him before making his way to the storage room containing the elements in question.

Knightblade pursed her lip plates, then looked to Wheeljack. "So? What was he doing before you got him on a tangent about how we met?"

"Just trying to remember a date." The inventor patted her on the back absently as he watched the door that the scientist had disappeared through. "Can I stick around? This sounds to be interesting."

\V/

Setting his finally completed work for the cycle down, Ratchet stretched and considered his internal chronometer. It was well past the time he normally stopped working for the cycle, but there had been a skirmish between a number of patrolling Autobots and a Decepticon raiding party earlier, and he was slightly behind on his data work.

The rest of his regular cycle medics had already retired to their quarters, just leaving the off-cycle duty medics cleaning the medical bay and Refit present besides himself. Glaring at his stack of data pads in his in box, his optics were caught by the sight of a slightly off colored pad within the block of gunmetal grey of Autobot standard issue. Optic ridges drawing together in confusion, he pulled that one out to look at.

When he put it down, it was all he could do not to call in Refit and curse her out for a breem just to make him feel better. It was from Wheeljack, apparently the inventor had slipped it into his 'deal with whenever' pile just before he and the two others had left for Crystal City. The pad contained a number of small glitches the SPARTANs had all seen his apprentice for, the ones they explained away as minor maintenance that they needed, and the three differentiating opinions that they had come up with for why it was happening. Masterfully controlling his temper, as there was no bot in range to intimidate or simply yell at, the medic seriously considered what he had just read and the consequences of it.

The news about the minor malfunctions wasn't surprising. He had been expecting something like it to pop up, given that all he had time for before the SPARTANs had split was a precautionary short systems check of each of them both times before they left the base. The fact that there was speculation about what would happen when their original functions were set to cease was a little unnerving.

The medic couldn't decide if the news about that was simple depressing speculation or an extremely late showing of the SPARTANs' practicality in simple survival.

Psychologically, he supposed that the fact that they were wondering meant the SPARTANs were adjusting to their situation. It could be a sign of acceptance or a questioning of their function and purpose, but the medic wouldn't bet any decent amount of credits on it. The very idea that it took them nearly a vorn to come to any conclusion about what had happened and the possible repercussions of any drastic changes was worrying.

Any bot with half a working processor could have told themselves within a breem of meeting a SPARTAN that they weren't all together complete in the CPU when they had first arrived in Iacon. There had been glaring personality flaws that had not been smoothed out or polished over by anything resembling civilized life; a disinclination to worry about the normal minor orn to orn problems that arose, a disregard for any spark threatening situations, and an inability to relate to most other bots.

Some were better with hiding the flaws, some were just awful to deal with, and each of them, after the vorn mostly on their own, had developed ways to temper the more grating of their personality issues when in company of other bots.

Ratchet hadn't argued with the SPARTANs leaving Iacon so soon after their arrival for no reason. The time away from each other and anything resembling the stark military style function they had to be used to had worked wonders on each of them. Even Warcry, who had stayed with the Autobots nearly the entire vorn, was all the better for the separation.

The only glaring exceptions were Rook, Refit, and Orpheus.

The saboteur was very easy going to begin with and had very little that needed to be smoothed out, and the little medic hadn't had the programming of a war built construct crammed into her processors. The assassin on the other hand, Ratchet was of the firm opinion that nothing short of a near deactivation would change that sour mech's tune to anything remotely pleasant.

He couldn't press them about their medical issues at that time without having them mute up about everything that could be linked to their more than unusual systems. He supposed that had been a gag order they had blindly followed in their previous functions, but it also prevented any medic from getting accurate information about the problems that affected the same systems.

Now that some time had passed, he was pleased that Knightblade had suggested some bot finally go through and parse her systems, even if he suspected that some other bot in her unit had ordered it.

Their concerns weren't entirely without issue, though.

The seven dead frames they had moved into the Iacon morgue spoke volumes. Each were in varying stages of conversion, and Ratchet had made some disturbing conclusions from them.

One was even a completely unchanged frame of a human SPARTAN, very little of the outer casing had been melted at the time of death and as a result the non-organic internals had been mostly intact. Most of the organic parts were still melted, contact with even the half-energon, half-liquid, acid like fluid that had encased them for over a centivorn leeched into the armor suit after a few vorns and did enough damage for only a general overview of what the humans had originally looked like from the inside.

He had found the alterations the SPARTANs had spoken of, mostly what he would equate to motor relay synapses and the lacing of carbonite that had fit over the calcium support struts. There were also worrying looking chips he found in one of the helms, something he intended to speak with Shadowdancer about, given that the specimen itself had come from a SPARTAN class III's frame.

He even had a complete support structure of a human SPARTAN locked away in the morgue. Shockingly enough, that structure only came up to his mid chest plates when the arms were extended above it's helm.

It was the interrupted conversions that were the worst to look at, for the medic himself. The twisted frames of mishmash human and Cybertronian systems were haphazard, as if there had been no set method of reformatting. The cause of death in each of them was when the human part of the SPARTAN died, for some reason the generator part of the frame was incomplete and the Cybertronian spark was extinguished by spark casing related malfunctions.

Whether or not such malfunctions would follow them into their new functions was debatable. It could be that the issue was a non-issue, simply minor glitches that needed to be worked out as they came up like Refit had theorized, or it could be that the worst case scenario would happen, and the SPARTANs could deactivate at any given time.

Given that the SPARTANs had chosen not to inform him of the development, Ratchet had little to work with. He could try cornering Warcry and forcing the tank into a complete systems check, but whether that would damage the minor amount of pull he had with that unit was a deterrent for the whole idea. He could also try talking with Refit, but given that she had chosen not to address the issue to him herself meant that 'her' soldiers had asked her to remain silent and he would get little out of her.

Gritting his dental plates, and gripping his hands together hard enough to dent his own armor, Ratchet decided to wait. Knowing the SPARTANs as he did, pressing about it now when it was still speculation would only serve to irritate them and cause them to avoid him and the medical bay entirely, and with their various problems and track records that wasn't a viable option.

Ratchet did not like waiting.

\V/

Rook cheerfully greeted the two travel worn brothers as they made their way into her dojo. "Wasn't expecting you two until next cycle. What did you do, drive without stopping at all?"

Trying to contain a jaw cracking yawn, Sideswipe just nodded tiredly as he stood in the middle of the main floor. "Yeah, was quicker that way. We need to crash, femme."

"Obviously." Still grinning, the saboteur motioned for the two to follow her up to the sky walk that let a bot navigate around to the rooms that the femme kept above her workplace. "I still have a room with two berths in it, but one is sized for a youngling's development. One of you could take the other guest room, but they are on opposite sides of the building. You can rearrange whatever you want while you're here, cause it's going to be a while."

The two following her up the stairs didn't say anything, merely grunted at her as she turned to the extra rooms she seldom found use for, which was more frequent than she had figured on using them. Sideswipe took Flashfire and Ruby's old room, leaving her with his brother.

As they wandered to the other side of the building, Rook risked a long look behind her at the gold painted dusty mech. "You know, there won't be a whole lot for you to do here. I can teach you some of the Covert Ops protocols that are universal for every member of our little club, but I only have a very loose grasp on what infiltrators do. Worked with a few for a bit, but I've never actually asked them how what they do differs from what I do."

He just grunted again, this time with a small frown. She opened the room that Jackknife had used when he was free-loading off her, before she and a few other SPARTANs had kicked the slag out of Goldbolt. Before he entered the room, he gave her another frown, this one she decided was more thoughtful than simply irritable. That surprised her, as she had thought he was just grumpy most of the time from what Galeforce had said.

"What do you want me to do?"

Short and to the point, and Rook couldn't decide if that was just how the mech was or if travel had made him shorter than he usually was.

"I've got nothing... well..." She paused and took a real good look at the mech standing in her home. "Tell you what. You take over some of my classes, and I'll have more time on my hands to deal with your brother's training. I'll even pay you some type of wage, but that would shorten the time you spend kicking around here."

Sunstreaker actually built up to a scowl, but nodded after a moment. "Fine."

She blinked at his back the split astrosecond before he closed the door, then grinned. This was going to be fun.

Walking back to the main floor, the saboteur wondered how the mechs in her function were going to react to her new borders, and whether or not she should tell them why they were here. She locked the dojo's main doors behind her and set up the security system, then wandered off to meet up with her favorite Enforcers and merchant out at their usual bar.

(ooo000ooo)

Bluestreak had a feeling that something was going on with his teacher. Last cycle she had been a bit quieter than normal, and that usually meant she either had or knew something that Smokescreen wouldn't like. The two metallic colored mechs standing in a corner of the dojo fit that bill.

He paused in the doorway, nearly making a few other bots walk into his door-wings, and debated with himself if he should go over there or not and introduce himself. The last mech Rook had in the dojo was one that his brother really didn't like, and now she had two more that he didn't know.

Since the grey femme wasn't on the floor at the moment, he deemed it safe to wander over. The silver one spotted him before he got close and grinned as he walked up.

"I take it you're Bluestreak. Rook told us about you earlier. I'm Sideswipe, and this is my brother Sunstreaker." The swordmech extended a hand and shook the merchant's with an enthusiasm the Praxian rarely saw out of newly met acquaintances.

"Hello then, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker." Bluestreak flicked his door-wings at them in greeting, attracting both's attention to his back, and wondered how to politely phrase what he wanted to know. Before he could think of a way to do so, Rook herself traipsed down the stairs and made straight for the three with a broad grin.

"Blue! My favorite mech in the whole wide world!" The merchant squeaked as the femme bounced over to him and swept him up into a spinal cracking hug. "I need a favor."

Kicking his pedes until the saboteur put him down, the Praxian looked between the two mechs and the femme. "Can I ask what before I agree?"

Rook grinned at the qualifier. "Yeah, sure. I'm going to be doing... stuff, with Sides here. Sunstreaker volunteered to help out around the dojo while I'm a bit busy. He knows the fighting style and everything, just I don't know if he's ever taught others before. I need an assistant for him while I'm otherwise occupied."

Bluestreak blinked at her, and action echoed by the other two. "Again? You know, the last mech you had cover your class for you just let them gossip."

"Yeah well, Jackknife wasn't really meant to teach them anything, that was just to delay him a bit." The SPARTAN simply waved that incident off. "So, will you do it?"

The merchant blinked at her again, then looked between the two other mechs. "Well... suppose I should. I mean, not anything against your taste in mechs, but that last one was rather bad. Not that you have a bad taste in bots you hang out with, after all, you come with Smokey and me and Blaster to bars all the time just to hang out, and we are not that bad. He was just a bit strange. Er... not that these two are strange, I don't really know -eep!"

Rook cut him off with another hug. "Thanks, Blue! And you don't have to be nervous. Sunny just looks like he's irritable."

She ignored 'Sunny's' glare and grinned again.

"Right, Sides, we're going to the slums, so be warned. Sunstreaker, we'll be back at..." flicking a glance up, she considered what she wanted to start with and what time her advanced class met up at, "the sixteenth joor of the cycle. Blue, I won't be able to go with you and your brother this cycle, why don't you take Sunstreaker with?"

The last of that was spoken over her shoulder plates as she chivied the silver mech out the doors. The same doors that closed before the merchant could respond.

Bluestreak looked at Sunstreaker, who was glaring at the same doors with blatant dislike. "I think we should... ah, get started?"

(ooo000ooo)

Rook dragged Sideswipe back a half a joor before she had stated to Bluestreak and Sunstreaker. When she got within range of her security systems' broadcasting reach, when she could tell remotely if she had visitors or not, she stopped in the middle of the road and looked back at the mech she had been working with nearly all cycle. "That brother of yours is hopeless in social situations."

"That depends on the situation." Responded the swordmech without looking up from working out a kink in his left arm assembly. He had wrenched it sneaking around after Rook, the femme enjoyed taking the less than obvious routes around visible paths. "If whoever it is talking to him is being polite, yeah, he just glares. When it starts getting less polite, my brother gets a bit... acidic."

The SPARTAN hummed to herself, wondering if she should just let the mechs in the dojo work it out for themselves or intervene. Blue was keeping it all polite, apparently the merchant had decided the gold mech wasn't that bad and didn't deserve his own brother's less than polite questioning. Smokey was starting to lose his patience, and Blaster was true to character and laughing quietly in a corner. Oddly enough, Jackknife was also in, lurking around in the second floor of the converted warehouse.

From the sounds of it, she should intervene. So with one hand on the swordmech's shoulder and the other free, she barged into her own place of work with a loud bang. "Smokey, leave Sunstreaker alone. Blue, I thought you all were going to be at a bar, not here interrogating my help."

The Praxian Enforcer swung around to glare at her. "Do you even know this mech, or is he like the last one and you just took him in to annoy the slag out of me?"

"Tried looking up his file, did you?" Rook grinned at him, then turned to Sideswipe. "I've got nothing else for you this cycle, just be back start of next."

The Autobot cheerfully ignored the dismissal. "You all blocked our files?"

Shrugging, the saboteur nodded. "It was, what did Shadow' say? Oh yeah, a 'just in case'. You are going to Trick' after me, and he's in Kaon."

She pursed her lip plates for a moment.

"Unless Trick' gets into trouble again, then he'll come here."

Sideswipe snickered and motioned for his brother to join him. "Rook showed me some of the bars she visits." Sideswipe steered his less than genial brother out of the dojo before the Enforcers could recollect themselves and try another tack.

Rook placed her hands on her hip joints and smirked at the Praxian Enforcer, who had a surprised expression on his faceplate. "Any other questions?"

"So you actually know them from-"

She tapped her finger to her lip plates. "We have audio receptors about, Smokey. And yeah, they are from that place we visited in Iacon."

That shut all three of them up. Blaster even abandoned his corner. "Which audio receptors, femme?"

"The ones that Smokey doesn't like. At all." Rook smirked again as all three of the mechs suddenly cast some suspicious looks to the second level of the warehouse. "So, are we going drinking or not?"

\V/

Shadowdancer carefully moved her rook to take her opponent's queen.

The mech sitting across from her and on the other side of the chess board and pieces she had carved with her free time hummed thoughtfully, then moved his bishop to take her only remaining knight, blocking her king into a corner.

The SPARTAN pursed her lip plates and thought hard about her next move. To make the match fairer, her battle computer was turned off, leaving her with a limited amount of processor power for the game. Moving her last pawn, she took the bishop threatening her king.

Soundwave tilted his helm at the move, but used his own pawn to remove her last one from the board.

Kynaite chose that moment to run up to the table his carrier and that mech was at, leaping up to her lap to get out of Frenzy's reach. He grinned up at carrier's raised optic ridge, then stuck out his glossa at the frustrated cassette trying to catch him for their usual game of tag.

The femme clicked her own glossa and tapped her youngling on the helm. "It's almost time for the bar to open, my little mechling. Finish your game upstairs."

Wilting a bit, Kynaite stuck his bottom lip plate out at her. "Stay up?"

"No. You get grumpy, and I don't like to deal with you when you're grumpy."

He whined a bit and sulked, but slid off her lap and back to the floor. The cassette, who had been waiting for it, tagged the youngling the moment he was back on the ground and ran off. Kynaite forgot why he was sulking and immediately bolted after Frenzy, scaling the stairs without a second thought.

The two of them passed Zephyr, who was on her way down with a stack of data pads that had the required business needed to run a bar on them. The helicopter grinned both at the bots who were still just shy of her hip joint and at the sight that greeted her. "You two still haven't finished that game? It's been what, three cycles now?"

Shadowdancer went back to inspecting the game board. "Hush you. We're not timing this."

"You mean it can be timed?" Asked the other femme as she set the stack of pads next to her employer.

Soundwave straightened in his chair, giving the impression that the XO had more of his attention than before, even with his battle mask and visor in the way.

"Yeah, sometimes the game is timed." Shadowdancer slowly stated and gave both of them a brief scowl before using her white square occupying bishop to take Soundwave's last knight. "A set amount of time is given to each player, and your time stops when it's the other player's move. It keeps some matches from lasting more than a single session at times."

"Observation: Slightly more efficient." The mech examined the pieces he had left, then moved his left most rook into another square. "Inquiry: Next match timed?"

Comparing the amount of time they had left until the bar officially opened for the off-cycle, the tactician sighed and started making notes on where which pieces had ended up. "Sure, unless you want to start a new round."

Soundwave nodded to show his approval to the idea, then cast a glance at the second floor. He had never been up there, but more than a few of his cassettes had. That was also where Ravage and Frenzy had gone, playing with the Praxian's youngling.

Shadowdancer waved a hand at him as she started to pack the pieces away. "Go, collect your cassettes from wherever they ended up. I'll see you the same time next cycle?"

The Decepticon gave her a sharp nod, inclined his helm respectfully to the helicopter ordering the data pads in descending order of what the other femme needed to look at, and strolled over to the staircase.

Zephyr blinked after him when he disappeared from sight. "I still can't believe you play games with that mech."

"What do you mean?"

Handing over the stack of pads, the silver and black femme sat herself down in the chair the mech had previously occupied. "I mean the mech's rumored to be the Third in Command of the _Decepticon High Command_. And you sit here and play some type of old school tactical war game with him."

"I have a number of Decepticons I associate with on an orn to orn basis." Shadowdancer frowned thoughtfully at her employee. "Blackout comes around simply to have me look after his symbiont on occasion, I think when he has missions that wouldn't benefit from a smaller mech or bot. And we still get Barricade, Bonecrusher, and Deadend every now and again."

"Well... that's different. _They're_ foot soldiers." Zephyr rolled her optics at the Praxian's flat look. "I mean _socializing_ with the Decepticon High Command. What would your brothers say if they could see you now?"

"Depends on the brother." The femmes trailed off as Soundwave reappeared, with a tired bundle of metal and wires in his wake. "Kynaite, why didn't you just wait upstairs for me?"

"Wh-whanted to say bye." Stuttered the youngling as he stumbled to her.

Shadowdancer's lip plates quirked as she stood up to sweep her adoptive creation off his unsteady pedes. "Sweet-spark, he'll be back next cycle and so will the others."

The youngling pouted at her use of the endearment, but used the added height of being carried in his carrier's arms to wave bye to the blue mech.

Soundwave hesitated in the middle of the room, but inclined his helm to the youngling before leaving.

"Aww, I think some bot's getting attached." Zephyr tickled Kynaite under his jaw plate, then waved the stack of pads that the SPARTAN had already gone through. "I'll put these in your office."

Blinking after her, Shadowdancer looked down to the sleepy youngling in her arms. "Kynaite, what do you think of Soundwave?"

"Nice." The bundle of blue and silver metal snuggled into her chassis a bit more, taking advantage of the extra heat every SPARTAN frame cranked out to compensate for the generator.

"Huh." The tactician frowned, wondering what it all meant, and if she needed to have a somewhat awkward talk with Zephyr about what she was expected to do about it.

(ooo000ooo)

Soundwave lingered nearby as Lazerbeak transmitted the conversation and the tail end of the youngling's observations of him. Recollecting his last cassette, the communications officer struck off in the direction of the Decepticons' base.

His once a cycle, joor long game session with Shadowdancer had done what he had been ordered to do, he was on good terms with the femme as far as he knew. Her processors were programmed differently than normal Cybertronians, rendering most of his processor reading abilities rather useless and confining him to the random observations he could pick up from her CPU on the occasions he was close to her _and_ she processed in a version of Cybertronian he knew.

The mild relationship he held with her also let him occasionally pick up the few complaints other Decepticons aired in the same bar, and he had a position to observe what she did with the information.

Which was nothing, really.

She and the bartender simply listened, then told the complaining bots to order another cube or get out.

His time within the establishment hadn't been a complete waste of time. He now knew more about the SPARTANs, by what little the helicopter femme thought about it when she was working around the two during their game time.

Reporting back to Megatron that there was at least one of the SPARTANs in both the Autobots and the Decepticon factions had the Decepticon Commander content to leave the femme alone, as long as he could eventually find the designation of the Decepticon aligned mech that was one of these SPARTANs for more information.

There were still inconsistencies with the femme and what she was doing, but they seemed harmless enough to ignore for the moment. So, with another cycle spent in the company of a tolerable bot, and worn out cassettes from playing with a hyper youngling, Soundwave reported in for another shift in the Decepticon base's communications room.

(ooo000ooo)

Zephyr laughed at her, and the question she posed. "Oh... wow. I don't think this would have been in any of the so called plans stacked up in your processor."

"That doesn't help. At all." Shadowdancer scowled at her assistant as she slotted another data pad into her outgoing pile on her desk and reached for another from the stack the helicopter had brought her previously. "What the frag does it mean?"

The both of them were in the Praxian's office, taking care of the last breem's work needed to be done and out of the way that orn before opening the bar to customers.

Still snickering, the other femme shook her helm at the clueless SPARTAN. "Kynaite has decided you need a mech in your function."

"He can do that?"

"He's bonded with you, right? And you're not his original carrier." Zephyr sat herself on the edge of the Praxian's desk with a smirk. "He can bond with another, he's still got an open ended creator bond. He's searching for something to fill the gap, now that the both of you are comfortable with the other."

The tactician tapped her claws on her desk as she processed that.

"That's disturbing." And not within the possibilities she had already planned for. Her CPU was starting to ache, her battle computer not too far behind, trying to fit this new twist on her function into what she was here to do. "I don't see any way this could end well."

Blinking, the helicopter grimaced when she caught on to Shadowdancer's concerns. "Damn, that's right. I don't know what you should do about it, then. On one hand, there really isn't anything set in pure titanium that says you can't have a relationship outside of your unit. But on the other, you're not planning to stay longer than it takes to finish whatever you started here, right?"

"No, to both points. But Holdout is more or less the only one of us that actually found a way to maintain an amiable relation with another bot, and I think that may have to do with Sandstorm's willingness to look beyond what she is and his infatuation with her. Rook still annoys the slag out of the mechs she socializes with." Lacing her claws together, and ignoring the final two data pads before her, the SPARTAN tactician put her processors to the task of finding her options.

The black and silver femme simply shrugged in reply. "There is nothing that says you can't just pick a mech, or a femme if you want, yourself. Sparklings and younglings have two bonds, and normally prefer a least some bot to take over the empty one. Just something to think about, I'm sure."

When the two femmes had returned to the altered warehouse after seeing Zephyr's paint enthusiastic friend, Dreadnought had informed them that a number of mechs had been looking for her personally. The ex-Enforcer had been alarmed, but the ex-human had been more slightly amused than worried until she knew who it was.

Two cycles after their return, the femmes went back to work and finally met the mechs looking for the Praxian. Blackout and Barricade, two of her more preferred Decepticon customers, had arrived earlier than they were usually expected to wander in, and had brought a guest with them.

It was painfully obvious that the blue painted mech following them was not a habitual bar crawler, he shied away from the overly loud music and the arrangement of his battle mask and visor screamed a bot that was anti-social. Both of the lower-ranking Decepticons, who normally either showed up alone or together on rare occasions, deferred to him and his decisions.

Taking that the mech was _ordered_ to be there, Shadowdancer had a rare moment of pity infect her processors and offered the group a more private room, one of the few that was used for business transactions and was shielded from the worst of the noise and crush on the main floor.

She had given the group about a joor to get any last astrosecond discussions out of the way, then joined them to see what it was that brought them in. Both of the mechs she knew well had been a bit stilted in their speech, giving her a clue that whoever it was they brought with was one of two things, either a higher ranking bot in the Decepticon command or a mech that had been ordered there and neither of the other mechs wanted it to get back to Lord Megatron or whoever it was they were reporting to that they were impeding whatever had been ordered.

She wasn't sure if she was supposed to know or not, but she gave the same amount of her time to the group as she did every bot else that wanted a bit of her company.

The next cycle saw Soundwave returning without the other two, and they repeated the routine for a while until the mech suggested a strategy game around another stilted conversation. They had eventually moved the time of the little sessions to before the bar opened, out of respect for the other's more sensitive audio receptors, and that had been repeating until Shadowdancer suggested a game that she was more familiar with.

Chess, once she explained the pieces and rules, had been deemed tolerable.

The routine expanded from there, including a point where they traded minor details about each other and the bots they knew over a cube of energon. That was the point where the femme figured out who it was exactly sitting across from her every cycle.

Shadowdancer had a few bad moments after she connected the rumors of his processor reading and the blue mech, but after a while she noticed he only picked up certain things from other bots and not from her own wandering processors. Running her CPU over why that would be, she had to conclude the reason why was because her programs ran in a different language than other Cybertronians; a mash of the once common English, her native Russian, and a few other human or not languages she knew.

Which had meant it was a good thing that she had yet to come totally clean with her assistant and what she ultimately intended to do in Gygax besides collect information. Zephyr knew enough to make the Praxian uneasy, but since nothing had happened yet she had to conclude whatever the helicopter was thinking when around the blue mech was mostly harmless.

Assumptions made her battle computer hurt worse.

With a sigh, the blue and black femme rubbed her optics, trying to ease the tension she could feel building behind them, and picked up the second to last data pad again. "Before I forget to mention it, Silentforce is due in this cycle."

"That's your brother that specializes in body guarding, right?" Zephyr blinked and parsed through her processors for the mech in question. "The one that was almost deactivated in Kaon?"

"Yes, to both." Shadowdancer made some changes then tossed the pad into her outgoing box.

"He doesn't-"

"Talk. At all."

"Oh," getting up from her perch on the Praxian's desk, the helicopter picked up the finished stack of pads, "well, this should be fun."

"Tell me about it."

(ooo000ooo)

Dreadnought was the first to see the other SPARTAN when the mech finally entered _Eternity's Drift_ near closing time. The old bar mech cast a weary look over the red and black bot, trying to decide if he should call the boss femme down for this one or not. She did tend to spend more time with the rougher looking sort that wandered in. "Business or pleasure, mech?"

 _:I'm looking for Shadowdancer. She's expecting me.:_ The mech took a seat at the cramped bar, ignoring the strange look his sister's bartender gave him for his method of speech. { _Three-four-one, I'm in your main room. Little crowded in here._ }

{ _Leave my bar alone. It's how I pay the fragging bills._ } The femme herself jumped down the staircase on the far wall and made straight for the two mechs. "Dread', this is Silentforce. He's going to be helping out with the unruly from now on."

The older mech raised an optic ridge, but compared the two before him and spotted the silver and gold symbol on the femme's armor painted on the mech's in the same place. He shrugged indifferently and turned to help the next customer trying to get his attention.

Shadowdancer tapped Silentforce on the shoulder plate, signaling him to follow her, and climbed the stairs with her fellow SPARTAN in tow.

"Few things you should be aware of." She stated as they got high enough to hear one another without having her shout. "Kynaite goes to the Youth Center every orn, from the fifth joor to the tenth, and he plays with the Decepticon cassettes and drones when they pop in. I've got a standing arrangement to play strategy games with one of the Decepticon mechs before the bar opens, and we do see the occasional brawl now and again when the soldiers stationed at the nearby base get paid."

{ _Okay. What aren't you telling me ?_ }

Letting them both in her office, the Praxian gestured to one of the neglected chairs on the other side of her desk. "I play with the Third in Command of the Decepticons, who can apparently read other bot's processors. One of the Decepticons, Bonecrusher, knows what we can do and saw us in action in Iacon a vorn ago. Apparently, so did Barricade, but he refuses to admit that much to me."

Silentforce's optic ridge rose sharply. { _Are you safe here ?_ }

"I don't know." Shadowdancer shrugged as she sat down across from her brother. "Kinda why you're here. I'm what was once considered a doomed spy, 'force. If anything goes wrong, we'll be the first to know by virtue of the number of Decepticons that know about me and my habits. I'm up as the most easily accessible SPARTAN, I had Orpheus remove his SPARTAN symbol before he left Iacon not too long ago, so they don't really know for sure if he is or not."

{ _So, you're acting like a decoy. The bitlit must have put a serious crimp in_ that _plan._ }

"A dangerous decoy, but yes." Lacing her claws, the XO leveled a serious look at the soldier across from her. "You're here as his first line of defense. If they get to me, _get him out_."

The mech scowled at the order, but nodded anyway. { _Nothing said about how I couldn't come back._ }

"I'm counting on it."

{ _I want to check out the city while the bitlit is at the Youth Center._ }

"Fine with me. Are you going to help with closing, or recharge?"

(ooo000ooo)

Working the switchboard in the Decepticon headquarters was both highly informative and processor numbing. Soundwave normally found more than a few scraps of data to hold over his fellow Decepticons' helms between the routine transmissions, and he could estimate where the Autobots were condensing their forces when the other bases reported in their casualty counts for the cycle.

It also let him keep up with the gossip than ran through the ranks without having to be sociable.

He heard about the red and black mech that the bar owner of _Eternity's Drift_ apparently knew well before his shift ended. Some of the riffraff that shored up the numbers of Decepticons in the base had talked about it over the comm lines after they had been tossed out, telling some of their fellows about the quiet mech. That he ignored any attempts made to converse with others and that he was taking over for the bar owner as the bouncer at the semi-popular bar.

The physical description, including the fact both the bar owner and the new mech had the same device in the same place, made the communications officer wonder if the mech was another of the bots called SPARTAN he that had picked some information out of the helicopter's CPU. Searching through the data pad that he kept with him while working, he pulled up the images of the same bots that had red and black for a color scheme from the vid file of the Iacon attack, and then discarded the femme's pic and took a closer look at the mech he found there.

Unsure about the proper protocol when dealing with bots that could only be loosely termed an acquaintance and inquiring about their friends or comrades in arms, Soundwave searched out Blackout. The helicopter had proven useful over becoming known to the Praxian, he was the one that suggested offering a game to the femme, and asking couldn't hurt anything but his reputation as a recluse.

The strategist was compiling his report of his latest patrol route, and wasn't all too surprised to see the 3IC headed straight for him. Flicking his back blades, he saved his place on the terminal he was working on and walked over to where they wouldn't be overheard. There were a few things he had never seen himself doing for the Decepticon cause before the whole thing with the bar owner femme started, and giving an anti-social mech relationship advice was one of them.

He took the data pad thrust at him without comment, well used to the 3IC's ways by now. Mildly surprised by the vid shot of another of the group the Praxian femme had been spotted with a vorn ago, he simply raised an optic ridge until Soundwave figured out how to phrase what he needed.

"Probable Location : _Eternity's Drift_."

"So we have another in the city. Wonder if he's been here the whole time or if he got past the blockade?" Raising an optic ridge, the helicopter simply shrugged at what he figured the other mech's question was. "Just ask when you go in next. If she tells you, great, if not... simply wait around and see if you can overhear anything." Blackout passed the pad back and patiently waited to see if Soundwave had thought of another question.

Soundwave simply inclined his helm and walked off, leaving the strategist to finish his work.

(ooo000ooo)

Shadowdancer decided she loved the rumor mills that existed in every military organization from this galaxy to the next.

When Soundwave showed up the next cycle for their game, he looked around briefly as he wove through the small number of tables and chairs that lined the walls to where she was sitting. Something he hadn't done prior to that very moment, and the SPARTAN-Bots' XO figured that it meant the mech already knew her brother was lurking somewhere around. She wondered if he would ask her straight out, or hedge around the subject for a while in his own indomitable way.

Silentforce was due back at any moment, having taken her youngling out to buy energon goodies. Kynaite had been ecstatic that his silent uncle was there when he onlined from recharge, and had been a bit more hyper than normal orns. Silentforce had volunteered to take the mechling to his session at the Youth Center, and to stop off for a treat if the youngling managed to behave himself the entire time.

Quirking an optic ridge at both Ravage and Frenzy, both who had come to be standing next to her pedes while she had been watching the bigger mech, she gave both of them a small smile. "Kynaite will be here in a bit."

Ravage took that as permission to curl up under the table, but the other cassette rocked back on his heels. "W-with-th w-w-who?"

"My cohort brother. You all haven't meet him yet." She tapped her claws on the table, considering the look the smaller mech was giving her. "They're due back any astrosecond now."

True to her word, a rocket propelled youngling shot into the bar followed silently by a red and black shadow. Silentforce quirked his own optic ridge at the new bots, but simply gave her a half-sparked salute and kept Kynaite from crashing into the marginally smaller cassette by catching him around the middle and hoisting him up to his own arms.

"You can set him down. 'force. The small bots usually play while we do." Shadowdancer grinned evilly at the cassettes, Ravage having crawled out from under the table when it became apparent he wouldn't be getting a nap anytime soon. "Silentforce here just took him out for some energon goodies from the vendor down the way. Have fun."

The bodyguard set the youngling down and watched the three of them shoot off, headed for the other side of the bar. He finally shook his helm and looked back to the XO with a questioning expression.

"Yeah, I'm evil. You already knew that." She looked back to Soundwave, who was studying the other mech. "Soundwave, this is my brother Silentforce. 'force, this is Soundwave, a Decepticon I know."

Both mechs inspected each other, then silently nodded a greeting at the same time. Shadowdancer's lip plates twitched upwards at the similar methods of the two. "So, 'wave. Are we restarting or continuing?"

\V/

Orpheus amused himself with playing twenty questions with the next bot that asked about the glyph he once had on his arm. Shadowdancer's order to remove the SPARTAN symbol from his paint job hadn't come at a moment too soon, as it was apparent the higher ranking bots in the Decepticons stationed in Polyhex was looking for him, or some other bot that matched a set of descriptions and requirements he just so happened to fill.

Toying with the mechs and femmes that got up the courage to bother him was the highlight of his cycles now.

He had enlisted in the Decepticons the moment he got back from the Report held in Iacon, spending most of his time now either patrolling the same stretch of land as before or working with other Decepticons at the base in Darkmoor. He was officially classed as a shock trooper now, something that amused him greatly when he considered the human shock troopers and their dislike of anything SPARTAN or SPARTAN related.

He had to restrain himself from operating at the SPARTANs' normal levels, to keep from attracting the wrong kind of attention, so he was a 'decent' shock trooper and an all-around competent soldier as far as his new superiors knew. It grated a bit, especially when playing ignorant impacted his performance reviews and he had to listen to some idiot rant about something that had gone wrong.

The assassin had even come faceplate to faceplate with Shockwave a few times so far, mostly when the scientist showed up at the base for some meeting with Ratbat. Those instances he had to restrain himself from simply off-lining the mech, as he knew Shadowdancer had something planned for him as long as he didn't go after another civilian stationed SPARTAN. He did snoop around to find out what the mech wanted from the Oil Auditor, but refrained from going any farther than that.

Currently, he was sitting at some pit of a bar, unsurprised that Scourge and Cyclonus eventually wandered over to where he sat in a corner booth. The higher ranking tracker and saboteur, respectively, took a seat across from him with their own cubes of the gritty mid-grade the bar served.

That was to be expected.

The other two Decepticons had started migrating to where he was when they all ended up in the same establishment, mostly because he ignored them and they could safely do the same without eventually having to cause damage to some bot too stupid to leave them alone.

What was not expected was for them to stare at him.

Orpheus arched an optic ridge in question. In response, Scourge cracked a grin. "I've been hearin' some interestin' things about ye lately."

"Should I be worried?"

Still grinning, the blue and white simply shook his helm. "Is there any reason yer dodgin' the issue when asked about yer past? Don't get me wrong, it's verra funny when these tin plated excuses fer cannon fodder get the nerve to ask ye about it an ye scare 'em away, but I was kinda wonderin' why."

Inspecting the broad grin the other mech was still wearing, the assassin had to assume he didn't really know much more that the so called 'tin plated excuses for cannon fodder' had when they asked him. He wouldn't have been so amused if he knew _what_ it was he was actually talking to. "Not really, it's just hilarious to watch them stumble over themselves."

"So then, can I ask about what ye did before this? Or are ye goin' to play the same game with me?"

Orpheus simply shrugged. "Was a gladiator, then the arena managers started to get sick of the sight of me."

"Huh." Scourge rubbed the underside of his jaw plate thoughtfully. "I was sure ye had been what command was lookin' fer."

"What, those bots that showed up for one fight in Iacon, then disappeared from view?" Arching his optic ridge, the assassin finally cracked a grin of his own and shook his helm. "Sounds a bit unreal, doesn't it? Why not say the same bots remained in Autobot territory, and not all these sightings around the planet, if not to make us more alert when patrolling?"

Cyclonus snorted and smacked Scourge upside his helm. "I told you there was nothing to those rumors. It's just some bid to keep the lower ranks occupied on their own stations for a while."

The blue and white mech scowled at the tabletop, but shrugged off the hit from the purple and gray mech. "Nothin' wrong in askin'."

"So, can we go back to what we normally do, or do you want my creators' names as well?"

Cyclonus gave him a dismissive gesture and turned back to his cube.

\V/

Warcry entered the Prime's office and stopped short just inside of the doorway, confused by the sight that greeted him within the familiar space.

There was a mech in the room that he didn't know, a larger than normal light metallic blue and gray bot that had dents and scratches lacing up and down his visible frame and armor. He had what looked like old Cybertronian Army insignias and unit crests on his armor much like how the SPARTANs had displayed their own symbol, on the upper arm armor plates for any and all to see.

The SPARTAN-Bot's CO tilted his helm at the two other mechs also in the office after a moment and raised an optic ridge at them. "You wanted to see me, Optimus?"

"Yes, I wanted to use your... unique experience in sounding out a number of other Cybertronians for that issue you raised before." The red and blue Prime had a smug smirk on his lip plates as Ironhide grinned broadly at the SPARTAN in the doorway. "This is Kup, he is the Security Director for this base, and he'll be going with you."

"Right..." The green and black tank gave the seated mech a short nod, then pinned Optimus with a searching look.

The Commander of the Autobots gave a tiny shake of his helm, saying without any betraying transmissions that Kup did not know anything about the unusual history of the SPARTAN-Bot unit's Commander or of the soldiers that he lead. With that reassurance, the ex-human turned his attention to taking the new mech's measure.

Kup had gotten a head start with that, he had used the time the two mechs were silently communicating to inspect the tank and his mannerisms, noting the questioning look but unconcerned by what it was over. Finally, the older Cybertronian stuck out his hand for the SPARTAN to shake. "Like the Prime said, soldier, I'm Kup. I've been fighting in the Cybertronian Army longer than most stars have been lit, and have seen things that would melt your CPU."

With that as an introduction, Warcry wondered what it was that he was supposed to say in return. He shot a bit of a questioning glance over to the two mechs simply watching them meet each other, then shook the older mech's hand and gave him a brief salute. "Warcry, I've been working in military administration for most of my function. It's an honor, sir."

"Very good, soldier." Kup turned back to the Prime watching the two military mechs interact, and rose to his pedes. "We'll search these young bots out for you, Prime. Don't worry about that."

The older mech almost turned to leave, but hesitated as if he had an issue he wanted to bring up.

"...I am looking forward to returning to training these newly minted, wannabe soldier bots you've been picking up lately."

Optimus gave the old military vet a gamin grin. "If you approve of one of the bots that I've picked for your job, that is what we'll have you do. Dismissed, the both of you."

Warcry saluted at the same time as Kup, the two gestures of military respect for a superior officer strikingly different in their execution from the pair of them, before they turned and left the office.

Ironhide shot an incredulous glance at the back of his charge, before rounding the desk to take the seat the older mech had occupied during the meeting. "Are ya sure 'bout this, Prime? Them two together, surely old Kup ain't as senile yet as ta assume nothin's wrong 'bout ta way Warcry operates. Especially since even Stonewall noted somethin' off 'bout Silentforce when they were in Kaon."

"It may end up alienating Kup from having anything to do with the SPARTANs, yes." Optimus nodded slowly at his bodyguard's worry, he had the same thoughts occurring to him before he decided to go ahead and push the two mechs together. "But, I believe Warcry would benefit with a mech that could act like a mentor for the time between then and now. Even then, there is nothing that states that Kup will react that way, he could simply take their history in stride. I am not going to put any expectations on that old veteran's experiences, and how that may affect his decisions."

The black mech frowned, but couldn't dispute the Prime's opinion.

(ooo000ooo)

Warcry watched the older mech navigate around his office, setting the things that needed to be done in a specific order so his second in command of Iacon's Security Division could easily navigate the mess. Hot Rod had taken the orders handed down to Kup with mixed feelings, obviously fiercely loyal to the Cybertronian military vet, but he also knew what the older mech wanted to do with his function, and was pleased that it was being offered to him.

By this time of the cycle the SPARTAN had already completed what he had needed to do with the running of his own unit, and Stonewall had agreed to handle the purely administrative parts while he was gone. Warcry had the vague impression that the old guild mech was going to hand most of it off to his lieutenant Lithium, but he was alright with that.

Once Kup was done rearranging things to his liking, the silver blue mech motioned for the green and black tank to proceed him out of the Security Room while giving the younger mech a few last words of advice. Hot Rod submitted to the lecture with surprising grace, nodding in all the right places and giving reassurances when needed.

The old vet caught up with the SPARTAN-Bot's CO near the base's gates, and both kept the amicable silence between them going until they had left the city proper.

Kup was the one to start the conversation, while they were on the way to one of the mobile bases stationed out near Kaon for the moment. Seeing as both were in their alt modes, the vet pinged the tank's comms politely first. _:I've been meaning to ask, but never got the time till now. What does your unit do? I've see what you all can do, I saw the vid file Hubcap took of your timely arrival, but I've heard next to nothing after that.:_

Warcry carefully considered his options in what to tell the mech.

Long before any SPARTAN left Iacon for the first time, he, Markmaker, and Shadowdancer had decided not to outright lie to any bot, which caused the rest of them to use some rather fancy verbal footwork in avoiding anything that would later be called maliciously deceiving once the truth was widely known. Taken into consideration was the Autobot Prime's own actions in sending the both of them out together, meant that the young Prime did respect the older vet's opinions, at least a little.

: _At the moment, civilian defense. Most of my soldiers are posted in each major city, and a few have even found some smaller ones they visit on occasion. I believe we have a few more stellar cycles in doing that, if not another vorn or two entirely._ :

: _Odd, I don't think that's ever been done on Cybertron before._ : Kup had a contemplative note in his transmitted voice across the short range comm line the two were using, almost as if he was musing over what had made the tank state his unit's purpose in such a way. : _I've done something similar before, back when the Cybertronian Army was out establishing all those colonies in space, though. Nearly six centivorns ago. Ran into a nasty type of rock eating organic creature while we were out there... Spat acid strong enough to melt one's armor off, let me tell you._ :

Listening to the vet's rather lengthy story of part of his time operating out in space and what he saw then, the SPARTAN started to wonder how the Cybertronian Army had operated before the schism between the Autobots and Decepticons ripped the military force in half and grounded most if not all the soldiers Cybertron had planet side.

He had never had cause to think about it before, more concerned with the Autobot military as it was now rather than how it had been. He filed the thought away for the next leg of their journey, as the old mech's story had taken up the time between Iacon and the base Ixion.

Ixion was a small mobile base, with a semi-permanent staff of fifteen keeping it going. Used mostly as a communications outpost, the base was considered a dead end in the rumor mills for any bot's military career.

Warcry transformed to his root mode and looked around at the, to him, strangely built craft nestled in the valley between two rocky outcroppings not too far from the Kaon border. "What are we looking for here?"

Kup consulted the data pad the Prime had given him just prior to leaving to look that up. He had decided to start with Ixion because there was very little else close to Iacon for them to check out on their itinerary, which made it the most logical choice for either the start or end of their search not because he had any high hopes for the bots inside.

"I haven't the foggiest, youngling. Just... look around for a bit. I've got to talk with the base commander, or whoever is in charge." With that, the old vet stalked off, muttering to himself about all the smallish bases he had ever been in.

A distinct feeling of amusement threaded through the SPARTAN, and he wondered if he would ever get old enough to disparage the age of others. With a shake of his helm, his processors were oddly whimsical that orn, the ex-human began to wander around.

It took him about two corridors to realize he was being watched.

Security cameras were _everywhere_.

They blanketed the small base, overlapping each other to the point where even if a section of them where to be taken out, the angles of the others would provide a distant, but still viable, vid of whoever took them out and was trying to sneak around.

Inspecting the cameras, their reach, and how they were set up, the SPARTAN CO pinged his saboteur's comms. { _One-two-seven? I've got a puzzle for you._ }

{ _A puzzle sir? I love puzzles. Hit me._ } Rook didn't sound distracted, so the tank assumed she wasn't doing anything too difficult with the twin she was supposed to be training.

Wondering if the mission he and Kup was on would let him check in on his soldiers where they were at in the big cities, Warcry sent the security layout schematic he had cobbled together from his observations of the base to her, and asked if she could find a way around it without triggering any alarms.

The saboteur was silent for a good fifteen breems, even as the other SPARTAN wandered around more and added to the loose layout he had already. By the time the tank caught sight of a slightly disgruntled Kup headed his way, the femme finally responded with a good deal of grudging respect to her reply.

{ _I've got nothing, sir. If it were just me, I would have already said screw it, and would set up a temporary distraction that would take out most of those cameras. But there are way too many redundancies for me to get in and out without triggering anything eventually without an obvious 'I'm right here, numb-nuts' sign. If whoever that is, is as obsessive about the upkeep of his cameras as it looks, then anything I could do short term would be fixed before long, leaving me without a way out._ }

With a faint smirk twisting his lip plates, Warcry thanked his fellow soldier and let the connection go just in time to catch the last of Kup's grumbling about the rather stiff reception he had gotten. "...and they said there was nothing of any note among the soldiers here. Fragging liars, there's always some good _somewhere._ Why, my last unit had several good candidates for promotion that we would have pressed forward when asked..."

The tank raised his hand from his side slightly, and the older mech trailed off. His expression wasn't one of confusion, more like expectation, and Warcry sent him a tightly encrypted message, using an encryption method that closely mimicked the Decepticon's current encryptions, about what Rook had concluded about the security of the base and what he could observe himself.

Kup's faceplate cleared of any emotion, and he nodded slightly to let the ex-human know he had caught on to what he was doing.

The two of them waited barely a breem before a spastic looking mech started shouting accusations at them from two hallways down the corridor.

The ensuring fiasco that happened shortly afterward remained cemented in the tank's processors for the rest of the decacycle.

The Commanding Officer of Ixion bolted out of wherever he had been hiding and tried to derail the security mech from his suspicions while also trying to shove him into a nearby empty room. Kup started asking pointed questions to the base CO about where the mech got the ball bearings to deceive an envoy of the Autobots' own Prime, while Warcry carefully watched the commotion.

What it all boiled down to, was that the spastic mech that had caught the Decepticon like transmission, Red Alert, was glitched. He was overly paranoid, to the point where he sounded alarms for minor maintenance problems and called in a lot of false alarms. The base CO was trying to keep the mech out of the way, to keep the glitched up mech from embarrassing the base and the other soldiers that worked there, and had little to nothing good to say about him.

Kup was content to leave it at that, now that he knew what it was that the base's CO was hiding, but it was at that point in which the SPARTAN became confused over what was going on. He had been looking over the reports of the alarms as the two were talking, and comparing them to what Trickflip would be forced to do if he was trying to infiltrate the base. "More than half of my own soldiers are glitched up worse than that, why are you dismissing him? He's more than just good at what he does, and these alarms have all the valid points of an infiltrator's presence."

"Glitched soldiers?" Kup stroked a hand along the underside of his jaw plate, considering the tank and the report he had finessed out of one of his soldiers and ignoring the fact that Warcry sounded confused for the moment. "Which ones?"

The tank shrugged dismissively, ignoring the two gaping expressions on the two other mech's face plates. "Rook, for one. She's a bit light fingered, and has always been that way. I think she and Ratchet call it a Kleptomaniac type glitch. Another would be Nitro, my demolitions specialist. He's a pyromaniac, likes explosions a bit too much. Those are, I guess, the worst, but there are a few more that are more personality glitches than any physical ones."

Looking over the work that the saboteur in question had sent back to her CO, the old vet compared the work to what he knew of Jazz and Ether's methodology. Even if he wasn't Special Ops, the old war machine had worked with a number of rather sneaky bots in his career, and couldn't see anything that he would suggest to improve on. "A thieving saboteur, and an explosion happy demolitions specialist. And you want to add a paranoid security specialist?"

"It works. If he can't catch it, I don't think it would be possible." Warcry pointed out with a patient expression. "You're looking for your replacement too, right? Why _not_ him?"

Kup blinked, the base CO spluttered, and Red Alert got new orders.

As the two war mechs waited for the smaller, and slightly stunned, mech to pack his quarters up to leave the mobile base, the older vet turned to the younger with a question that occurred to him before, but again never had the opportunity to ask. "You know, I don't think I would have given that bot a chance if you didn't have your unit to draw examples from. What made you pick glitched bots for your soldiers, anyways?"

"I didn't." The tank shrugged, thinking back to the moment Shadowdancer had told him she didn't want command shortly before Wheeljack entered their functions and lead them to Iacon with Prowl and Jazz. "They came that way. I wasn't our original Commander, so I sort of inherited the unit as it is."

Kup thought about that, putting it together with everything else that he had learned about the tank framed mech, and asked another question. "So, why didn't you resort them? It can't be easy dealing with so many problems."

Warcry shrugged again, this time dismissively. "There's not enough of us left to be picky about who does what."


	23. Chapter 23

Blurr darted down another street, trying to get home without running into any bot that might wish him harm, not that he had seen any that would attack him recently. He was becoming more than a little confused by what was going on lately, seeing as the Decepticons had finally managed to pin the courier missions he ran for the Autobots to him only to suddenly stop trying to accost him about it nearly a stellar cycle ago.

Not that he had any reason to complain, but the unknown reasons why the Decepticons were suddenly too busy for him were unnerving to the fastest bot on land.

It was the tail end of the work orn, the streets of Yuss were empty and shadowed with the lengthening twilight. Blurr was a streak of bright blue as he made his way out through one street and into the next. He was about three blocks from his flat when the sounds of a fight reached his audios.

Skidding to a halt and nervously looking around, trying to find where the racket was coming from, the data courier debated with himself on whether or not he wanted to see what was going on.

His decision was made for him when the fight started to move towards him in the form of some Decepticon thug getting kicked into the wall three feet from him. Forcibly keeping his vocalizer from betraying his position, the Neutral mech circled the block as fast as he could to get a better vantage point, and hopefully one that would let him see what was going on without being spotted by whoever was making the ruckus.

Zipping up the stairs of one of the apartment buildings, one that had a public through way to the roof, Blurr peered over the edge, and then had to prevent himself from shouting out in shock by clamping his hand over his mouth component.

One of the other couriers from his guild was systematically beating up the Decepticons in an alleyway, working with another mech painted gray and green to take down the rough looking bots sporting the Decepticon faction symbols. He froze where he was, trying to figure out what it was the other mechs were doing.

If the Decepticons were attacking them, did it mean they were Neutrals like him that worked for the Autobots, or what?

(ooo000ooo)

Quickgrip flipped his last opponent violently into a stack of metal crates, smirking at the sound of the thin metal of the other mech's armor shattering. As he chanced a glance back to his cohort brother, the close-quarters combat specialist caught sight of a shadow, most likely cast by some bot watching the goings on from a higher vantage point.

With a sigh, the black and gray mech checked to ensure that the two of them had gotten all of the Decepticons before giving his brother a heads up about the bot spying on them. Galeforce waved him on to deal with it himself, busy tying up the last of the assaulting bots tightly enough that it would take them most of the off-cycle to get loose again.

As he slunk off to confront whatever bot was spying on them, the SPARTAN felt a brief passing regret over the orders from Warcry that kept the civilian stationed bots from being able to kill as discriminatingly as the Covert Operations team could in Decepticon aligned cities. He had to give it to the CO though, if all the civilian stationed SPARTANs were allowed to kill just as much there would be a visible dip in the residents of the cities they lived in, judging by how annoyed _he_ could become at the mundane tedious repetition that occurred in orn to orn life.

Quickgrip started to scale a residential staircase to reach the roof, thinking that the added height would let him catch whoever was watching him and his brother earlier, only to get a speeding bot ramming into his chest plates and knocking him back down the stairs.

He twisted under the unknown bot, gripping the wiggling mass of metal and bearing down his weight to pin the unknown bot beneath him as they slid down to the next floor's landing. As soon as the world stopped spinning, the close-quarters combat specialist groaned. " _Blurr_ , what are you doing here?"

The blue mech squeaked as the SPARTAN hoisted him up off the landing and set him back on his pedes. "I'm-sorry-I-didn't-realize-it-was-you, I-thought-they-were-the-Cons-after-me-but-those-Cons-haven't-been-after-me-for-a-while-now. I-was-wondering-what-had-happened-not-that-I'm-all-too-sorry-not-to-see-any-of-them-for-a-long-time-but-I-was-a-little-concerned-about-what-they-were-getting-up-to-"

"By the Pit..." Quickgrip blinked at the mech and his runaway mouth components for an astrosecond. "Blurr, you're worse than Rook's Bluestreak."

The SPARTAN awkwardly patted the mech on the back as he checked him over for any damage from being used as his body board for stair surfing.

"And I thought _that_ mech could ramble."

The other courier mech trailed off in his rapid fire speech, watching the jerky movements of the gray and black bot. Needless to say, Blurr was confused.

Checking the roof quickly to ensure that the blue bot was the only one he had to worry about, the close-quarters combat specialist steered the fastest mech on land to where he had left his brother dealing with the last of the Decepticons for the cycle. "Gale', we got a visitor."

"And we care... ah." Once he spared enough processor power to risk a glance back to where his brother was, the combat engineer trailed off in his customary quip and inspected the data courier for damage.

Besides some rather large scratches that scrapped down his back and one side, the mech with two tones of blue paint seemed unharmed for the most part. He literally looked like he just had a run in with a larger mech, which he did, but still mostly intact.

Galeforce straightened up and turned to face the two. "Err... hi."

Blurr blinked up at him, and the SPARTAN who was still wearing his Autobot faction insignia blinked back uneasily.

Quickgrip smirked as he spent a moment to ensure the Cons wouldn't be going anywhere soon, then shoved his brother down the street and motioned for the Neutral to follow them. "I don't know about the two of you, but I need some fuel. Care to join us, Blurr? We've got a bit of news that might interest you."

(ooo000ooo)

By his second cube of energon, Blurr was even more confused. "You-were-sent-by-the-Autobots?"

"Err... not really. At first, I was here in my capacity as the SPARTAN-Bot in residence. Stumbling onto the Cons after you was more of a... matter of luck." Quickgrip fiddled with his third cube, optics locked on the table between them. "When we went back to report in to our unit commander, I was talking about the bots after you with our CO, and Prowl happened to overhear. He knew what you've been doing for the faction, and told me that command phrase to let you know you weren't the only Autobot aligned bot in the city."

Galeforce, his pedes kicked up on the chair next to the civilian data courier, lifted his helm and chimed in with,

"Then I was sent to the city, because the number of Cons started increasing. Two helms being better than one, and all that." He straightened up, letting his pedes clang to the floor. "Point in fact, though, is that you need better security, mech."

Blurr blinked at them, and the close-quarters combat specialist elbowed his brother roughly. "What he meant was that you need some help with this. Running from them seems to have just annoyed the slag out of those Cons, given how many are about now compared to when I first ran into you. Gale' helps some, but it will be easier to keep you functioning with your cooperation."

\V/

Shockwave contemplated what he had learned so far, locked down in his laboratory hidden in the middle of nowhere.

Somewhere in Cybertron, there was a line of purpose built war bots wandering around. Some illegal, or boarder line illegal, faction of the old Cybertronian Military had created what amounted to a unit of the perfectly manufactured soldiers, hidden them among the stars for a number of vorns both to hide their tracks and to season the warriors. Now that they were back, these war bots were content with just watching the current war escalate.

It just wasn't in him to tolerate such a thing, that these bots with such experience and talent would be wasted by simply watching the conflict.

He was, first and foremost, a scientist. Shockwave intended to capture one of these so called SPARTANs, pull them apart, functioning or deactivated, and learn what secrets went into their builds. Then he would manufacture his own soldiers, programmed to be loyal to him, and would oust the pretentious 'Lord Megatron' and take the Decepticon faction farther than where they were stagnating now.

The question was, which one to go after?

He now had, thanks to one of the two bounty hunters he hired, an incomplete list of where some of them were to be found. Hiring the bounty hunters, which he had given less than a twenty-five percent chance of acquiring anything of use, had surprising paid off in an interesting manner. One of them had met his end at the servos of these SPARTANs, but that just highlighted how competent these soldiers could be and was deemed to be a convenient loss instead of an insult to his authority.

As a bonus, the surviving bounty hunter was confident that he could get closer to one of the SPARTANs that was located in Simfur City. As a _merchant_.

Shockwave snorted to himself, loading up the partial list of SPARTAN-Bots and their location Axel the Bounty Hunter had given him. A super soldier, working as a civilian merchant. How far the mighty fall.

There were only seven bots on the list; one Praxian named Nitro that was the SPARTAN in Simfur; a femme named Rook that lived and worked in Praxus; another femme called Clearsight in Ankmoor: two that seemed to live in Decepticon cities, Gygax and Polyhex respectively, by the designations of Shadowdancer and Orpheus; an Enforcer in Tyger Pax by the designation of Titan; and another Enforcer called Markmaker in Vos.

He ruled out Simfur, because that was the SPARTAN Axel thought he could get closer to, the two Decepticon cities as too close to Megatron to be safe to operate within. Ankmoor and Tyger Pax were too far to control the outcome of with any degree of efficiency, but Praxus and Vos were possible.

In the list, it informed him that the Rook femme taught self-defense in the slums, and that the Vos Enforcer had patrols that took him to each of the multi-leveled city's seeker districts. Weighing the pros and cons of going after each of them, either separately or together, Shockwave tapped his finger tips on the counter that held his personal terminal.

Any thoughts that brought up Vos, also called up rumors of the new Air Commander who acted so much like how these SPARTANs were supposedly operating like. Rumors that hinted at the possible heavy military past the Air Commander and his trine had.

Processing that, and the list of bots now before him, Shockwave called up the Decepticon mainframe and sifted through it, hacking his way past a number of firewalls his fellow Decepticons put up to protect their own information on the servers.

In Soundwave's files, and the scientist snorted harshly at the thought of the ex-scientist turned communications officer 3IC of the Decepticons, he found something interesting. The mech had frequent meetings, ordered by Megatron, with one of the SPARTANs, the Praxian femme by the designation Shadowdancer.

That correlated with the information he had, as the femme was listed as the only SPARTAN in Gygax, but it also had a note about some silent red and black mech. Apparently, the mech had arrived at the bar the SPARTAN ran recently, and was referred to as the femme's brother.

A bar? He supposed it was better than merchant work and had all the signs of information gathering, which he could respect as an alternative occupation. It also meant the Praxian femme worked in the military as either a spy or an information gathering specialist.

Shockwave supposed he could forgive the Bounty Hunter for that error, as the note had a time stamp from the time Axel had spent within his base being processed, and not out acquiring information in some obscure methods. It made the Gygax route more tempting, two within the same city was a prize he could almost not pass up.

What was also very interesting was that the Praxian femme had a youngling bonded to her, designated Kynaite. Whether or not it was her original creation was not mentioned, but to the scientist's annoyance, Soundwave sounded almost fond of the scrap of metal in his notes.

The option of seeing how compatible these seemingly purpose built SPARTANs were to normal Cybertronians in their base programming was intriguing, but was also not the only option he had, and he could always go back later.

He finally found the files he was looking for, within the server space reserved for one Starscream, the seeker in charge of the Decepticons' aerial forces and another former scientist in the Decepticon ranks who had styled himself as the Decepticons 'Supreme' Air Commander. He had almost maniacally detailed notes on the possible origin and history of the new Air Commander and his trine, but there was very little substance other than rumors and heresy.

Mostly that was, other than a vid file marked as the Iacon attack almost a vorn and a fourth ago. Watching it gave the scientist more of an idea of what the SPARTANs could do, and verified that the Seeker Council's new Air Commander and his trine was, in fact, some of the SPARTANs with unusually built seeker frames.

Now, Shockwave had an important decision to make.

Did he go after another Decepticon's mark and head to Gygax to steal the femme and her so called 'brother' and 'creation' out from under the sensors of Soundwave and his pet cassettes, or attack Vos to capture the Enforcer and hopefully one or more of the trine of the new Air Commander?

Each had it's drawbacks and attractions and he needed to plan it well, no matter which route he took. If he could manufacture a virus that turned Neutral bots into prime Decepticon candidates, then he could match mettle with these so called super soldiers.

He would take them alive or deactivated, tear them apart bit by bit, rebuild them even better than before; then use them to rip Cybertron from the grips of both the Autobots' weak willed Optimus Prime and the Decepticons' tyrannical Lord Megatron.

\V/

Spotter caught up to his trine leader before he had to leave for his usual off-cycle conference with Lightning. The expression on the smaller seeker's faceplate was what caught the bigger seeker's attention, for he hadn't seen the recon scout so blank since they woke up on Cybertron.

Without hesitation, the Air Commander diverted from his path and headed to one of the conference rooms on that level of the Aero Space Division Headquarters, and cleared it out of seekers on their breaks with a well-placed scowl.

As soon as Spotter was inside, the dark painted SPARTAN shut the door and turned to his subordinate. "What is it?"

"You know those seekers you told me and 'stripe to watch?" The smallest seeker of the SPARTAN trine was too agitated to hold still, his wing plates flexing and settling as Drax watched, concerned. "Starcream, or whatever, and his two new cronies, Skyfart and Thunderaft?"

Suppressing the impulse to smirk at the unflattering nicknames his trine mate had come up for the traitorous seeker and his new trine mates, he nodded slowly, wondering what this was all about.

"They've been warning some seekers to get out of Vos for a while, have been for a few decacycles now. Which, at first, I thought was more like either a vote of no confidence in you as the Air Commander or Screamer trying to gather his support base in another city. But lately, some of the rather reputable of our frame class have been given the same warnings, and some of them came to me when you were out on that seekerling tour a bit back. Rumor was before that the Decepticons were amassing to attack Vos because that whiny Starscream lost the title to you. Now, it's cause some high ranking Decepticon is interested in Vos for his own reasons."

Drax stiffened, glaring out at a nearby chair. "Do these rumors mention any solid time frame?"

"Those didn't. Just... the ones that warned to be out of the city by the end of this megacycle, which started up not too long ago." Spotter came to a halt right in front of the Air Commander, wincing internally at the same set expression he had worn earlier. "I didn't come to you before this because there was no sign of the Decepticons anywhere near the city, but 'stripes just spotted a group of bots that's too large to be any normal convoy for merchant shipping or traveling entertainment group."

"So, how far out are they?"

"About five or so joors. 'stripes also trying to find where they're going to set up their staging area for the assault, he said he'd comm when he found it."

With a heavy sigh, the SPARTAN trine leader ran his clawed hand over his optics. "What have you been telling the seekers that came to you with this."

"Just to keep an optic out, and we would warn them if it looked like it was going to happen."

"Right then. Start warning them. Get Shadow' on the link, and give her a layout of the city. I want to know what routes they are more likely to use, and which we can safely leave only a few Enforcers to guard. I'm off to see Markmaker, so give me what you've got already."

(ooo000ooo)

The tank framed SPARTAN Enforcer frowned thoughtfully as some bot knocked on his door. With a shrug, as every bot in his precinct knew he was leaving in a few short orns for Tyger Pax and some of them might be stopping by to say their farewells, he took the few strides to the door and cycled it open.

He was surprised to say the least at the sight of the dark painted Air Commander standing awkwardly in his doorway with a scowl on his face plate at the off duty Enforcers gaping at him. Drax had to hold himself at an angle to keep his wing plates from scraping the hallway's walls, and from the bits of paint transfer on his wings the 2IC of the SPARTANs had to conclude he failed a time or two on his way into the cramped Enforcers' barracks.

Without a word between them, he let the seeker in, closing the door again on the curious loiterers in the corridor when the SPARTAN had contorted himself to get in without any further injury to his frame.

"We have a small problem, Mark'. I don't think you're getting to that transfer to Tyger Pax anytime soon."

\V/

Shadowdancer froze in the act of trading her rook for Soundwave's knight on the chess board, her door-wings suddenly arching high and some circuitry in her chevron lighting up the blue spires of crystal to the point they glowed.

She remained so still after the initial jerk it was alarming and even Silentforce's helm snapped up and over to her, attracting the attention of every bot that was in the bar before was due to be opened for the off-cycle in three joors. Finally completing the move she had started, the Praxian planted her claws on the table besides the chess board, dug them into the metal, and looked over to the worried helicopter hovering at her elbow joint.

"Zeph', we're not opening the bar this orn. Let Dread' know he's got the rest of the cycle off, and to come back next orn at the usual time." She shot a glance over to the red and black mech near the main doors of the converted warehouse, and he nodded before walking off to put up a sign.

Zephyr hesitated, alarmed over what it was that had her employer's attention so thoroughly that she froze up, but started for the second level where Shadowdancer's office and two extra berth rooms were. She tried to smile reassuringly to Kynaite, who had stopped playing some card game with Frenzy and Rumble, but the youngling only had optics for his carrier.

The blue and black femme laced her finger joints and leveled her gaze at the Decepticon across from her. "Did you know Vos was being attacked this cycle?"

Soundwave blinked at her, uncomprehending, before a transmission from Lord Megatron caught his attention with a data packet of the same information and demanding his attendance at Headquarters. "Negative."

"Did you know I have four cohort brothers living there?"

Soundwave concluded he thought the calm, almost conversational tone she was using was intimidating. Given that he mostly did the same thing to others, he could now appreciate it's effect on others better. "Number Aware Of: three. Identities: Air Commander and Trine."

She pursed her lip plates, but nodded almost resignedly. "I take it this wasn't sanctioned by your Commanding officers then, right?"

The hard edge in her vocalizer made clear she would not accept anything less without a measure of violence.

"Affirmative."

"Then you and Lord Megatron will have no objections to this." She leaned forward, her optics now a ruby red, and hissed out the rest. "If any of my brothers are harmed, I'm going after whichever fragger is behind this and _ripping_ _his helm off with my own claws_."

He was close enough to her to catch the vid files that tagged onto the tail end of that threat, visions of alien worlds and strangely put together organic creatures being slaughtered by the scores flashed through her processors and his by turns, but he couldn't figure out what it was that she was doing when she had seen all of it.

Soundwave nodded slowly to acknowledge her words and intent.

It was the Decepticon way, after all. When one bot inconvenienced you in some way, you retaliated. The severity and reparations all differed depending on the situation, but she had the right to go after some bot that attacked her family unit and deactivate whoever it was that threatened them.

Shadowdancer nodded again, this time more distracted by a heavily encrypted transmission she initiated than icily furious at anything with a Decepticon faction insignia. "Leave, Soundwave. I'll comm you when I'm ready to continue our game."

Without objection, the mech beckoned to his cassettes and left the bar with the smaller bots following after, wondering if Shadowdancer knew that if she took out a high ranking Decepticon, she would inherit his or her rank and station in the faction.

He hoped it was Shockwave being foolish. Or that Starscream seeker, seeing that it was Vos. He wasn't picky, both were equally annoying.

\V/

Warcry came online, and stared at the ceiling for a moment until what awoke him out of recharge hit him again. Shadowdancer and Markmaker was requesting his presence in the tactical up link, and neither one was being patient about it. What was worryingly was that it was both of them _and_ Drax.

With a quick check to make sure he hadn't woken Kup, as the base they were in was rather small and had limited space so they were stuck together in the same guest berth room, he swung up to his pedes and quietly walked out of there, heading out to the courtyard to stargaze while he was otherwise occupied.

{ _Alright, alright! What the slag is so..._ } His 3IC wasted no time on pleasantries, and slammed the required information into his processors in a large upload that made his CPU ache. After the initial stab of pain faded, he got one good look at what she sent him before his engine nearly seized up.{... _oh, fuck me._ }

{ _Not even if you begged me, zero-four-six._ } Despite the humor, his 2IC sounded flat and cold in his processor. { _One-one-three has started evacuation procedures, but only the seekers are going to get well gone before this slag hits the fan._ }

Spotter was apparently in the air with the _ATHENS_ , for there was a real time updated map of the city and the activity within; color coordinated for frame type, job classification, and estimated time to the unit's final evacuation. The rapidly shifting colors and symbolically represented bots would have made any other creature, besides possibly Prowl, sick to their tanks, but the SPARTANs kept up well enough to get a rather accurate impression on what was going on.

The blue-green triangles that represented the seekers on the map were already well within the projected safety zone, the northern section of the city, and rapidly hauling aft to escape the oncoming trouble. The green squares signified the ground bound framed bots, and they were lagging badly behind their aerial capable compatriots. The differentiating shades told what time was left before the individual was due to leave the city limits, but most of the regular framed Cybertronians were much darker than the seeker frame set.

To make matters worse, there was seven levels to the seeker city, and there was no way the bots stuck on the highest tiers of the city were going to get free before the Decepticons' purple arrows made it to the main bridges that were the only thoroughfares from one level to the other in the city.

{ _A distraction or some time buying maneuver is needed, and soon, or the civilians are screwed three ways from the Pit. When the Cons get to one or two of the main roads into the city, it will be all but over for the slower bots on the higher levels._ } Shadowdancer manipulated the map, scaling it out and moving the angle they were seeing it at so they would have a clear view of the transparent city from the angle the Decepticon forces would see. { _This bridge here, it looks like at first glance to be the only way into the city. There is a seventy-seven point eight-zero-three percent chance, at best, and a fifty-four point nine-nine-eight, at worse, that if we can take out this bridge before the Decepticons arrive in force, we can turn back the initial thrust of the assault without any major casualties within civilian ranks._ }

{ _I've sent that plan on, but the seeker council looks like they're going to argue about the necessity of that action. Apparently, that bridge is_ historic _._ } Drax sounded frustrated, underneath his own veneer of calm control.

Warcry could sympathize, it was the first true test of his leadership in war for the seeker community. Faltering at all now would cost him most if not all the confidence the seekers had in their new Air Commander.

{ _Historic? And that is worth the price of the lives in the higher parts of the city?_ } The disgust in the 3IC's voice was echoed by the other SPARTANs linked up at the moment, as they could appreciate history but didn't think it was worth much beyond the occasional moment of admiration. { _Ask them if... oh, bloody hell._ }

 _Shadowdancer_ being distracted was so unusual that it caught all of the bots up short, even the two other seekers listening in by way of their bond with the trine leader.

It was a tense few moments until she came back to the link, sounding coldly furious. { _Tell zero-two-seven to sit on Shockwave's base and to alert me when and if that fragger moves. He's the junkyard reject behind all this slag. I already knew my pacifistic attempt to attract his attention here failed, but he's now a Covert Operations target. To be listed as a high security risk, and to be treated as such._ }

Before Warcry could ask what that meant, Drax seconded with the same deadly fury, and there was an incoming packet of data alerting all of the SPARTANs of what that meant. The short of it was, Shadowdancer intended to kill him.

Uneasily, as there had been no discussion on what rights and responsibilities the Covert Ops Division had against the normal duty SPARTANS, the tank Commander of the unit called SPARTAN-Bot decided that was a conversation better left until later and turned back to the issue at hand. { _With that mech pulling strings, what are the chances now that blowing the bridge will work, three-four-one?_ }

{ _Less than a third of what it was. With Shockwave controlling the assault, probably on a real-time basis from some puppet, it's likely that multiple methods into the city have been looked at already, long before he decided to commit any number to this attack._ } The tactician paused, considering her suggestion from another angle. { _Unless... well, maybe. But that only has a sixty-three percent chance of succeeding for as long as we need... and only a less than fifty shot of not being countered quickly..._ }

Still looking for a viable option to use, Drax caught on to the femme officer's line of processing before she committed herself to it. { _Destroy the bridge when most of them are on it? We would need a big bomb._ }

{ _Then let's ask our resident bomb enthusiasts._ }

\V/

Nitro was in the middle of an install with one of his customers when Shadowdancer got a hold of him. He thought about the problem for a moment as he finished up his work with less than half of his processors on his task.

{ _The way I see it, the only thing in range you could get in time would be the grenades I made up just in case of the worst happening. Problem is, I'm not too sure it it's powerful enough on it's own to take out Cybertronian construction made to last centivorns. Maybe the grenade I made for three-four-nine with the one with two-six-zero's-bloody hell, it would take_ all _of them... but they were made with the intent of being paired with our generators. Even with all four in the city set off in close proximity, I'm not all too sure if it would work, unless there are four support beams weak enough for_ one _to take out._ }

By this time, the Praxian mech had ushered out his latest client out of the room and signaled to Axel that he was taking a break. He got an odd look from the former bounty hunter for that, but the mech didn't say anything as he walked to the back of his store, wiping his hands free of oil with a rag.

{ _What, exactly, works with the grenades in our builds to cause a larger explosion?_ } Warcry wandered around the courtyard he was standing in, finally sitting down next to a low wall and setting his helm in his hand.

{ _The energon that out pours from the generators. It's similar to energon in it's processed state in any other bot, but not exactly. It's got a higher alkaline level for one. But the point is, the grenades would only work the way I intended to if paired with a SPARTAN spark chamber._ } Nitro entered his office and slumped into his chair, kicking his pedes up on the data pads he normally worked out of in the room. { _I wonder... if we really have sparks? I didn't take it into consideration when I made them up... but with a spark, I assume it would end up being even more volatile than without._ }

{ _Thank you, zero-two-seven._ }

Shadowdancer let her fellow Praxian drop from the link, taking the formula and specs for the grenades from the demolitions specialist with a fleeting sense of appreciation for the work that had gone into them.

{ _He must have been really bored at the start of our first vorn out here._ } She smirked half-sparkedly, paging through the information slowly. { _It won't be enough to simply raid the civilian energon stores, or even every drop of high grade you could get your mitts on. If any of the four of you, and I know your listening zero-seven-zero and two-six-zero, have any chemist training, now would be the time to come forward._ }

Silence was the only thing that answered her, and she sighed heavily before continuing. { _I have some, I needed it to gain my bartender license, so we don't need to bother zero-two-seven again. But here is what you need to do..._ }

\V/

In one of the newly abandoned chemical labs of Vos, Drax was carefully working with Shadowdancer's instructions on how to make what amounted to a SPARTAN-Bot's blood. At least, that was how he was thinking about it.

The required refinements to make what ran through their fuel lines was fascinating, and he made a note to bother the 3IC for more lessons later, but he was only halfway done and the city had less than two joors left before the Decepticons outside the city would amass for their attack.

Carefully pouring in some acid to change the glowing green goop into a pinkish color, the Air Commander frowned at his work as he waited for it to settle enough to continue. { _Are we really pink inside? I mean, the green is interesting and all, but... pink, really?_ }

{ _Focus, one-one-three. No, we're not pink. Normal Cybertronians are pink. According to AI, one-nine-three, and the Hatchet of Iacon, we're some mix of blue and purple._ } She ignored his groan, aware that he was trying to distract himself from the reality of him playing chemist while his charges and city were in danger, and fed him the next few steps. { _The sodium sulf-no! Not that one, the container next to the one you almost grabbed. Then add four drops of the blue acid two shelves over helm, and stir until mixed._ }

Like the XO said, the final product, after another few breems of work, simmering in the vat was blueish purple glowing sludge. Drax grimaced at the sight of it before he pressed the lid onto the vat and started transferring it to four separate containers for shipping. { _That's disgusting._ }

{ _We produce it better, it's smoother in our lines than it could ever be in that volume. Something in the mixing, I think. Or it could be how the mercury is added well before we consume energon for fuel._ } The seeker could almost feel Shadowdancer's shrug through the link. { _I'm not zero-two-seven. Ask him later._ }

With a grunt, Drax manhandled the four smaller vats to the loading bay doors, where one of the dockworkers was waiting patiently for him to get done and load the containers onto the flat bed he had in his alt mode. "Are you sure about this, Air Commander? I'm not one to buck orders, but this sounds mighty risky to me."

"All we need to do is buy time for the bots on the seventh level to get down here, and this, though there's a risk that all it will amount to is a pretty light show, will do that." The SPARTAN secured the last vat in place, and tapped the mech on his side. "Done and done, meet up with the Enforcers on the Jadeite Bridge, and your done here."

"Yes, sir." The mech wasn't going to argue, seeing as it was rare for any seeker framed bots to take interest in the ground bound living in the city. And when the fragging Air Commander himself was putting serious effort in keeping the others like him alive and functioning, it wasn't his place to argue with him.

(ooo000ooo)

Markmaker unloaded the same dockworker and sent the mech off to leave the city by the north bridge before the Air Commander could join him on the south one. "What took _you_ so long?"

"Updates from Spotter, and I had to grab his grenade." Drax helped the tank framed Enforcer to move the vats in place, halfway down the bridge in plain view of the oncoming forces.

"Are we sure this is even going to work right?"

"Shadow's not entirely sure it will do more than go up in a big flash of light and do no damage, but she and Nitro are working over the formulas to predict how they'll do."

Shoving his last container of sludge in place, the Enforcer looked out to the marching forces of Decepticons slowly moving in on the city. "Fraggers, the lot of them. Why don't they travel in alt mode? It would be faster."

"Faster, yes. As intimidating, not really." With a dismissive rev of his turbines, the Air Commander looked over at the same visage. "It's an obvious scare tactic. Wouldn't work as well if bots could reason it off as a really big entertainment group coming to the city for some reason."

Markmaker grimaced, and turned back to his fellow Enforcers, who had by now blocked off the bridge and had directed all traffic to one of the other bridges out of Vos. "Stay out of the way, and keep the civilians moving. Let me know when the last of them leave."

The other Enforcers, while not used to taking all their orders from a mech that only ranked Staff Sargent, took one look at the dark painted seeker standing next to the tank and decided not to argue. The Air Commander himself, who was rumored to be the tank's brother, was glaring out at them.

Drax cast a look over his brother once they had gotten a way away, and noted the one piece of missing equipment on the other SPARTAN that stood out. "Where is your cannon? I thought you had that thing permanently welded on?"

"Can't travel from one Enforcer precinct to another armed to the dental plates, unfortunately. It's secured in the ship." The tank rolled his shoulder joints, keenly feeling the missing weight of his main weapon. "Just one of the drawbacks of living like a civi-bot."

With a nod, he vaguely remembered Titan complaining once about it a long time ago, the Air Commander turned his attention to his returning trine mate.

Tigerstripe dropped in before them, ignoring the hissing his turbines were giving off in complaint of his overuse of them, and saluted them both. "Found their staging area, but it's deserted. Looks like they don't intend to fall back at all. Don't think they can, either."

"Explain."

"Most of them out there are wearing some type of collar. I think it's explosive, too." The aerial tank shook his helm bemusedly as he worked out the kinks in his neck cables. "I sent a vid of it on to Nitro to see what he thinks, but he and Shadowdancer are doing something a bit more important at the moment, he said."

"Right, meet up with the seeker council and keep them informed." Drax clapped his trine mate on the back plates as the larger seeker passed them, exchanging a disgusted look with Markmaker.

The more the two of them learned of this Shockwave mech, the less either of them liked him.

With a sigh, the tank framed SPARTAN took a seat on the low barrier that separated lanes of traffic on the bridge and stared out at the incoming hostile forces. "The only thing left is to wait."

"I hate waiting."

\V/

Soundwave watched the happenings with barely concealed interest. Against established protocol, Shockwave had not informed Lord Megatron of his intent before he launched his attack, making anything that happened his sole responsibility to deal with.

The Leader of the Decepticons had simply smirked when the communications officer had delivered Shadowdancer's threat against his rogue officer, interested beyond belief in what the Praxian femme intended for the scientist operation on his own agenda when barricaded within the city.

The ex-gladiator was now watching a streamed vid of what was happening in Vos, transmitted by one of the Deceptions still loyal to him, with a few other of the Decepticons who knew of the SPARTANs. Barricade, Blackout, Bonecrusher, and Dead End with the rest of the Stunticons filled up the rest of the communications room with Lord Megatron, Soundwave and his cassettes to see what was going to happen.

Having been the one to inform the Praxian of who it was threatening her brothers, Soundwave was watching to see if the femme would be forced to take on the Military Commander by her own words.

Dead End had dragged his brother Stunticons with him to see the fight, as happy as his depressive personality could be to witness the coming destruction like some entertainment vid.

The rest of them had varied interests in how it was all going to turn out, from either personal reasons to keeping track of what even a few SPARTANs could do.

Right before the forces were due to hit the city's main bridge, another mech entered the cramped room. The dark green and black Decepticon ignored the attention, sparing a glance for the vid screen displaying the besieged cityscape of Vos before looking back to massive silver mech who lead the Decepticon faction.

"Shadow' passed on that you were looking for me... Lord Megatron." He raised his right hand, two finger joints extended, and gave an odd salute to the ex-gladiator. "I'm your faction's resident SPARTAN."

"You don't say." Megatron narrowed his optics and inspected the mech, from his odd build to his faction insignia. "Why would she do that?"

"Cause she had a favor to pay back." Orpheus' orange optics flicked to the blue mech sitting at the control panel then back to Megatron. He didn't add that with Shockwave intent on Vos, Shadowdancer had decided there was no reason to keep him, or herself, out of general view anymore. "So, she told me to move my aft and get out here."

Soundwave was using the time to check the mech's digital signature against the Decepticon rosters, and by that time had located the mech's information in the servers. "Identity: Orpheus, shock trooper. Assigned Location: Polyhex's Darkmoor base. Estimated time between Gygax and Polyhex: three joors."

"A SPARTAN can do it in less than a joor, if in a rush." The SPARTAN assassin grinned darkly as he let the door close behind him. "We're not built to match any factory's specs. In fact, there isn't a _complete_ blueprint on any of us anywhere on Cybertron. So, you could say we're one of a kind."

"You haven't explained why it was that it took this Shadowdancer's word to get you to come to me." The ex-gladiator stated mildly, tapping his clawed fingers on the chair he was occupying.

"Shadow', although referred to as our sister, is in actuality one of our commanding officers. Our Tactical Lieutenant, and the Head of the Covert Operations Division, as well as our Third in Command of the SPARTAN-Bots as a whole." Orpheus shrugged dismissively. "She was a little concerned that if this Shockwave mech learned that I was a Decepticon, he would try and abduct me so he could pull me apart and see what made me tick. Now that the mech is mostly doomed, she's not as concerned the same thing will happen with you all."

"Inquiry: 'Mostly doomed'?"

The SPARTAN shrugged again, this time with a gamin grin stretching his mouth components. "Shadow's painted him a priority target. If she's not getting to kill him after this is over, then one of the other Covert Ops bots will make it their sole purpose to track him down and rip him to pieces."

"Other Covert bots?" Since the mech didn't look like he was going to break out in some violent manner over the assault on Vos, Blackout settled back in his chair. "I take it your one of them as well?"

Orpheus sketched him a mocking bow. "I am the Covert Ops' assassination specialist, at your service."

\V/

Drax punched one of the Decepticon scouts as hard as he could in his lower chassis, forcing him to stumble back and tripping right off the edge of the bridge.

He and Markmaker had been dealing with the forerunner scouts of the forces intent of besieging the seeker city for the last half a joor, defending the location they had chosen to blow up. The trine leader was starting to become concerned, though.

It almost seemed that the Decepticons attacking knew what they were doing, or trying to do at any rate.

Shadowdancer theorized that it may just be the fact they were standing there, presenting a perfect target for the more enthusiastic Cons spoiling for a fight. However she hadn't sounded confident of it, in fact she seemed almost puzzled by something about the small skirmishes.

It may have been just her being too taxed to put much processing power into it, by the up link's drain on her processors. She was sustaining both links to him, Markmaker, Warcry, Nitro, the rest of his trine, several of the other SPARTANs that expressed interest in the happenings, recording what was going on for the _ATHENS'_ ' memory banks, processing the formula of the energon mix, comparing it to the grenades and the processed energon they produced, as well as the real time updated map of the seven tiered city at the same time.

Spotter was trying to take some of the strain off the XO by using the _ATHENS'_ communications array and computer banks to take on the less complex of the tasks she was processing, cursing himself out the entire time for not thinking of it sooner.

No one knew the limits of the Praxian's processors, but it was a daunting number of tasks that she had taken on.

It had scared Refit enough that she had reported it to Ratchet, and the Head Medic of Iacon was currently cursing the femme out from several cities away for stressing unknown equipment to it's probable limits when they didn't know the consequences of it.

Most of the other SPARTANs had taken the orn off or had not gone into work that cycle, waiting to see what happened. Concern was a new worry for them, as this was the first time they had to watch as one of their own was in trouble where they could do nothing about it.

Drax shook his helm as he backed away from the edge of the bridge. "Think I should scout out what's going on? This is almost worrying behavior from an assault perceptive."

"You might want to." Markmaker scowled out over the beginning of the bridge, wary optics locked on the main force that still seemed a joor or two out. "They're acting weird, even Shadow's got the CPU space to agree with that."

The Air Commander nodded sharply, taking off into the air. He avoided the _ATHENS_ ' shield, as the interstellar starship was hovering just above the city, circling the city's limits. To any normal seeker's optics, the craggy rocks the seeker city was perched on seemed abandoned in wake of the city wide evacuation.

To his optics though, sensitive to light and heat signatures because of his human origin, he caught the glimpse of light off armor plates from some bots near the base of the cliffs. Alarmed, he sent a vid of it to the XO, who cursed loud and long as she caught on.

{ _They aren't even going to fragging use the Pit be damned bridge! One-nine-six, what type of slagging service tunnels does Vos have!_ }

\V/

{ _I'll find out, ma'am._ } Trickflip responded as he slammed through some Decepticon patrol between his temporary home and the closest service tunnel entrance without even a backwards glance on his way to the underground maze beneath Kaon.

He searched out his favorite minibot team of Dune Runner, Iceberg, and Ransack a couple levels under the main streets, quickly taking out the mutant they were working to take down together in a spray of oil as he punched through the creature's helm with all his strength.

"I need some help, mechs."

Iceberg blinked in shock, cleaning the splattered oil covering his optic lenses at the same time as he lowered his blaster. "Trickflip? What the frag, mech?"

"What do you know of the tunnels under Vos?"

The vaguely familiar by now SPARTAN's unusually stern faceplate and nearly worried vocalizer threw the minibots off guard, and Dune Runner was the bot to answer the bigger mech. "Vos? Almost the same as here, 'cept it's a bit more mapped out. And... there have been a few rumors lately..."

The acid green and black mech dropped to one knee, staring intently at the minibot. "What kind of rumors? It's important, mech. I wouldn't be asking otherwise."

The tan miniature mech frowned, but had to give the bigger mech credit on that.

He had been nearly obsessive in keeping out of the way when he was down here, only interrupting their work when it was possible that the minibot team he had come across was in danger of being obliterated from whatever they were up against. Dune Runner was also thinking about how easily the mech had ripped his hand through a mutant's helm and how much that power would help the minibots and their task down here in the dark.

"Some of the teams that recently came from Half-Screw City, the minibot city hidden near Vos, were talking about some big bots that had been trapped in one of the abandoned service tunnels that lead to some old energon processing plant. That plant was shut down when the energon that formed in the pools under the city dried up a few centivorns ago."

"Right, owe you a favor, mech. Later though." Trickflip nodded sharply to them and got up fast, turning on his heel stabilizer and disappearing from sight in the darkness.

{ _You get all that, three-four-one?_ }

\V/

{ _Yes. One-nine-six, it was a fragging distraction in plain view. Four-five-nine, take the grenades and set off our ruse. It will probably serve as whatever signal is being waited on for the attack to start._ } Shadowdancer abandoned the computation she and Nitro were only halfway done with, dumping the excess information into the extra memory banks Spotter had available in the _ATHENS_ and used the extra processing power to boost her battle computer. { _Should have figured they would have caught on, but I thought the allure of only two guards stationed in view would have dispensed with any suspicion they might have had to that plan._ }

The tank took up his own explosive, as well as the trine's, and shot at the first of four barrels they had set up on the bridge with his M392 assault rifle once he had gotten far enough away. They exploded as they were intended to, taking out the bridge like the XO and demolitions specialist had figured on even without the grenades added to the mix.

Markmaker took a moment to admire the results of a mock-up of their own energon had wrought before walking to the edge of the now broken bridge to ensure the Cons would not be able to use that method to get into the city before starting to make his way to the lower levels of the city.

Drax shot that way as well, turning almost on a dime in the air, trying to locate which processing plant held the Decepticon assault teams. There were two main ones and three smaller still somewhat used plants that they may have used while he had been distracted by the visible forces marching on the city.

However, when he finally located the plant they were using, some of the bots that had been part of the distraction force had joined up with the other half of the assaulting ranks which filled up the abandoned structure to nearly overflowing.

The Air Commander grimaced sourly as Spotter took the location and added it to the map of the city being transmitted. { _Frag it all, it'll be a massacre if they get to any part of the city still occupied._ }

{ _The Enforcers here say that it'll be another joor or so before the last of the bots get out of the city._ } Added Tigerstripe irritably, still dealing with the political side of evacuating a city in a short amount of time.

{ _Add another half joor to that, just because of last astrosecond things that is so common to forget about_.} Added Markmaker dryly, drawing from his experience in helping with the early stages of the city wide exodus. { _We could station ourselves in the main junctions out of that district..._ }

{ _No, you can't._ } Shadowdancer's vocalizer was just as firm as it was grim. { _There are too many alternative paths from there, as well as the ones that were inevitably not marked down in any official layout of that level._ }

She hesitated, pouring more of her processor and battle computer's available processing power into examining each and every angle.

{ _There may be another way... but the results of which I cannot predict._ }

The tank Enforcer's attention was caught by the catch in the tactician's words. { _Tell me, three-four-one._ }

{ _…if the processing tanks are not empty, we could use them as the vats I had one-one-three make up. Pry one open and toss a grenade into it, letting the explosion clear out the bulk of them out in one instant._ } Shadowdancer spoke the rest of it slowly, almost as if she was reluctant to admit it. { _However... I do not have the plans for the plants. If you did so, there might be a possibility that the structure may not hold up to such abuse, and collapse, bringing the city down with it. With how the grenades are designed to be armed, you would need to be close to trigger the explosion and run the risk of being caught in it. In that eventuality, you may as well use the suicide bomb as they were intended to be used and simply set it off in close proximity._ }

Drax wordlessly activated his stealth systems, dropping to the overcrowded ground floor to check the tanks. His carefully built systems helped him avoid knocking into anyone or alerting the Decepticons to his presence as he threaded through the edges of the press of bots. { _Their half full, ma'am. I think they're being used as holding tanks for some of the energon dispensing companies of the city._ }

{ _Get out of there, one-one-three. That's an order._ } Markmaker dropped to his tank alt form, as he was marginally faster on treads. { _Three-four-one, how would I open it without spilling the contents?_ }

He felt Shadowdancer freeze up momentarily, then drop them both to a private channel. { _I take it you're willing to run that risk? For you, there is less than a fifteen percent chance you will live through it. Four-five-nine, you should know that one-one-three has a better chance of not being harmed-_ }

{ _We can't ask that of him. He's got other responsibilities to see to, and the seekers are already starting to realize that they need him and the trine._ } The tank felt some gallows humor of his leak through to her at the thought, even with the acidic tone she was using. { _We also can't risk any of our established SPARTANs' respectability, and I'm no longer established in the city. Remember? I was transferring to Tyger Pax. Besides, I don't even need the tanks, right? My spark casing would work, or rather the generator I have._ }

{ _No one is established in fragging Vos anymore!_ } If anything, his humor torqued the Praxian off even further. { _The city is nearly abandoned!_ }

{ _And I'm no longer needed._ } Markmaker's firm tone made Shadowdancer catch hold of her automatic response before she spoke it. { _Give me another way, and I'll see to it that it's done. But if this has the most chance of working to save the rest of the civilians, than my function as an Enforcer here was a success._ }

The XO tried and tried hard, dumping a number of the others out of the link to give her more processing power to bend to the task, but by the time the tank had closed in on the energon processing plant Drax had picked out as the Decepticon's staging base she couldn't give him an alternative suggestion with a greater chance of his survival and success.

Even worse, the last of the civilian bots had exceeded their expectations and had cleared out of the city, leaving no reason for her to object anymore.

{ _Four-five-nine... Markmaker... I'm sorry._ }

Transforming to his bipedal mode, the tank framed SPARTAN ignored the alarmed shouts from the Cons when they spotted him. He marched to the loading bay gates of the plant, wincing only slightly at the impact of the small caliber weapons fire as they pinged into his heavy gage armor plates, making small dents at first. { _Don't worry about it. It's been fun, Shadowdancer... or rather, Natashia. Try not to get too caught up in your plans… that was always your problem._ }

{ _Will... you do remember I owe you a favor, right?_ } Markmaker grinned broadly at the tone Shadowdancer had, even as the Cons started firing mid and heavy caliber weapons at him. { _If you do this, it only leaves that one way to repay you for that..._ }

{ _What do you think I'm counting on_?}

{ _And here the others call me evil_.} The XO picked up all of the other SPARTANs' links then, connecting them all so they could see what was going to happen.

All the other SPARTANs stopped what they were doing, whether or not it would alarm the bots around them at the moment, watching silently as one of their own marched to his death.

Markmaker reached into his subspace, pulling out the four grenades he had and popping the pins of two of them. Even as the concentrated fire in his direction chipped away at his heavy armor plating, the tank opened his chest compartment and placed the armed grenades clenched in his hands against his generator spark chamber. A few of the more accurate of the Cons managed to score some hits into his open chassis, but by the time they registered something off about the tank framed mech marching in on their position, Markmaker released the trigger spoons.

The SPARTANs watching through his sensors heard the final clang as the thin pieces of metal hit the floor, just before a white light blinded them all and Markmaker's feed abruptly switched into static. They didn't have time to react, before Shadowdancer's overworked CPU crashed and the femme herself hit the ground of her office, knocked off-line from the force of the feedback stressing her over her limits.

\V/

With their connection snapped in such a way, Silentforce was nearly swamped by inquires over Spotter's part of the up-link about what had happened to the XO. He mainly ignored them, racing up the stairs to where he heard the thud of metal hitting synthetic carpet.

He barged into the office with an alarmed Zephyr on his aft, stopping short at the sight of the Praxian face down on the floor and not moving. The helicopter had to push the red and black mech out of the way, rushing to her employer's aid.

By the time she got to the Praxian's side, the femme herself had rebooted and was already trying to regain her pedes, moving so slowly Silentforce took hold of her elbow joint to help her up and escort her to her chair.

"Sorry. That... um... that hurt." She winced at the set expression on the ex-Enforcer's face plate, and waved one clawed hand tiredly. "I'll explain it all later, Zeph'. But I need you to take care of Kynaite for a little while."

Her own face plate hardened, and she shot a glance to the silent bodyguard standing next to her.

"Tell Knight', that she was half right."

He stiffened, almost taking a step forward to her, but she shook her helm at him and he stopped before he moved any further forward.

"I think it was the injuries I had before... they cut my life expectancy down to... well, this." Shadowdancer's gold optics looked down at her clawed hands, flexing them to test how they responded. "We're not going to deactivate... it's a _reset_."

She rose up, faster than she had moved to the chair, and rolled her helm to loosen her neck cables.

"But for the moment... I have a visit to pay to Shockwave. If Soundwave comes back while I'm gone, I'm out running errands and will be back within in a megacycle or two."

Silentforce hesitantly came to attention and saluted the femme as she passed him.

Just before Shadowdancer would have left her office, she punched a hole into the wall and drew out her shotgun. "Don't wait up for me."

\V/

All but two of the Decepticons in Gygax's base watched as Vos practically collapsed on itself on the vid screen, listing terribly on the cliff it was perched on.

Orpheus was waiting for any sign from the suddenly non-responsive XO's part of the up-link, holding himself stiff and with his attention turned completely inward.

Soundwave watched him, wondering what the encrypted transmission was about for while he could pick it up, it wasn't in any computer language he knew of.

The dark green and black mech suddenly rose to his pedes, attracting attention of all the bots in the room with them. "I have to go. Shadow's calling in the Covert Ops."

"What?" His attention grabbed, Barricade twisted around from his position next to a bank of computers to look at the assassin. "Why now?"

"She's got a favor to repay." Orpheus dug around in his subspace for his Covenant dagger. "That blast you saw? Just before the city collapsed? That was our brother Markmaker... and Shadowdancer owed him a favor for saving her spark way back when. With him dead... there is only one way to repay him... and that's by ripping his killer apart bit by bit, slowly and painfully." He turned back briefly and gave the Decepticons a wicked smirk. "Like Shadow' said, she's going to rip Shockwave's helm off herself, and she needs the rest of us to cover her back plates while she does."

Lord Megatron returned the smirk. "Then have fun, Orpheus. And when you return, bring Shadowdancer with you here. I need to have a word with her."

He had no problem with the SPARTANs going after his unruly subordinate in revenge.

In fact, it would ease a few of his more problematic internal problems.

\V/

Rook slowly rose to her pedes from where she had been sitting on her dojo's main floor. Walking just as slowly to her room, she knocked together a sign quickly and posted it on her way out.

It stated that she had a bit of business to take care of outside of the city, and that she would return within a megacycle, but classes would still be held. She also left a brief note to Sideswipe and Sunstreaker on her berth room's door, whom she had sent out earlier on a training free orn, stating that while they shouldn't slack off they were expected to keep up with the classes and their training on their own while she was gone.

\V/

Trickflip suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, ignoring any and all bots around him, and just as quickly reversed his course to take him out of the city. He had no pressing business that couldn't be taken care of later.

\V/

Drax, and Spotter in the _ATHENS_ , nearly fell out of the air when the up-link suddenly cut off like that. Abandoning the ship to hover in midair, the recon scout dropped out of the loading bay doors and shot to the ground like a speeding bullet.

Drax slowly followed, optics and sensors locked on Markmaker's last known position. The silver and white seeker was trying desperately to move the great slabs of stone and metal in his way, only slowing in his frantic motion when his trine leader placed a heavy hand on his shoulder plate.

"Stop, Spotter. He's gone. Mark' dropped off even Shadow's sensors before the city collapsed, and that means we won't even find halfway decent chunks of him if we dig far enough to where he was."

Sitting back on his thrusters, the recon scout shook his helm slowly, still staring at the ruins of Vos under his knee joints.

A roar drew the pair of seekers' attention as the last remaining Decepticons still outside of the city, the part of the distraction force that had not joined up with the force under the city, charged the ruins. It was equal parts desperate and furious, causing both SPARTANs' optics to narrow in their direction and rise up, preparing to defend their brother's last resting place to the very end if need be.

Before either could move so much as a motor, the _ATHENS_ high over helm responded for them.

The shield that hid the ship from view peeled back, the secondary guns freed themselves from their hatches and the ship fired into the remaining Decepticons without any direction needed from either of them, with a final chasing shot from the MAC gun in the bow into the last dregs of the battered distraction force.

Optics wide, Drax cast a glance to the ruined assaulting force then to his smallest trine mate. "Please tell me Tigerstripe is in the ship."

Spotter timidly shook his helm in the negative, still staring at the starship operating on it's own without an AI.

The Air Commander frowned, then a moment later scowled heavily at the sky as a transmission caught his attention. "I need you to inform Tigerstripe that he's going to have to cover for me for a little while longer."

He cast a glance up at the ship, which had at this point returned the guns back to their original position and was closing the shield over itself.

"And try and find out what the frag is up with the _ATHENS_ while I'm gone."

\V/

Warcry started violently as the connection with his XO fell apart, and after a moment he snapped upright in his seated position and came optic to optic with Kup.

The older military mech was regarding the seated SPARTAN with concern in the dim light. "What is it, lad? What's wrong?"

The SPARTAN-Bot Commander raised one shaking hand to his helm, then scrambled to his pedes in a near panic.

"I have to return to Iacon. There's a problem... a really bad problem." The tank started walking, faster than he had while following Kup around the last megacycle. "I think my XO has gone rogue, and her division with her. They _all_ stopped responding to any transmissions sent by the rest of us."

\V/

Knightblade dropped the glass beaker she had been holding, staring off into space silently. Perceptor and Wheeljack, who had been visiting simply for something to do between jobs, both stared at her worriedly as she turned to face the door suddenly, still staring blankly into the distance. "I have to go."

"Knight'?" The inventor ignored the shattered glass on the floor, taking a few careful steps after the sniper. "What is it?"

Giving the shattered mess only a brief look, the scientist wordlessly gathered his things to leave the city for a small length of time. "Do not waste time, Wheeljack. Obviously, something of vast value has occurred, and something is now weighing harshly on her processor. Collect yourself quickly and follow as soon as you may."

Wheeljack was nearly shocked, having listened to the least amount he had ever heard Perceptor talk before, and nodded slowly as he followed hurriedly.

\V/

Warcry returned to Iacon, which looked like it was mired in the midst of a disaster zone.

The displaced seekers had retreated past Central City to Iacon, given that the Decepticons had attacked their city so they took shelter with the Autobots, overcrowding Iacon to the point where you couldn't turn around without hitting some seeker's wing plates. It didn't look like any of the ground bound had made it that far yet, or they had decided on another city to run to.

He ignored the press of displaced bots, gently shoving his way to the Autobot base's gate with Kup silently following in his wake, who was wondering what was so bad the younger soldier would disobey orders for. Communications lag was not unusual between far flung cities, and from the sounds of it the SPARTAN-Bot unit was stationed as 'far flung' as it got.

Optimus Prime was in the nearly overrun Command Room with most of the senior officers at his disposal; as well as two of the SPARTAN trine, Perceptor, Wheeljack, Jazz, Prowl, and a timid new red and white mech for the Security Division who looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Warcry jerked a thumb joint at the two seekers, and they both silently followed after him as the Security Director strolled over to where Hot Rod and Red Alert were busy processing the new influx of seekers intent on joining the Autobot ranks.

Spotter and Tigerstripe walked into Warcry's office after the tank, both wondering what it was they were going to say about their trine leader's missing presence to their CO. The SPARTAN-Bot Commander didn't say a word, he simply dropped into his chair and stared at them both.

A few silent breems passed before Knightblade let herself into the room, with Optimus Prime in her wake. The sniper wasted no time in jumping into what brought her back to the base. "I'm sorry sir, but I never thought this would come up. I would have told you sooner if I had any idea it would happen."

"Care to explain what you know of why the Covert Ops bots have suddenly gone off the reservation?" Warcry had a curiously set expression on his face plate, almost like he knew it wasn't going to be a pleasant story to hear. "And why it was Silentforce passed on that Shadowdancer said you were half right?"

The femme's mouth components hung open for a moment as she processed that, shutting them with a click once she figured out what that meant. "Did she pass on anything else?"

"Reset. That's all Silentforce would say about it. That, and she was acting a little strange after it happened."

Knightblade shook her helm slowly.

"Without Shadowdancer synced up to the up-link again so I can take a look at her, I couldn't begin say what that means. I couldn't even begin to guess why it started with her..." Trailing off with a dawning sort of horrified realization, she pressed one hand to her lip plates. "Her injuries... didn't Ratchet say her left arm assembly was only held together with the thinnest part of her proto frame?"

Spotter nodded to confirm the fact. "She was one of the ones Dr. Halsey didn't think would survive for very long."

He had come across that list one cycle way back, but hadn't seen a reason to pass it on to any of the others.

"The damage done to her before our stint in Cryo-Stasis must have cut her health down tremendously to start with. With her being in such a delicate state, the All-Spark must have had less to work with in her conversion." She blinked, then shook her helm to clear her CPU. "That's not why the Covert Ops have left their stations, though."

"They've what?" Optimus looked from one SPARTAN in the room to the other, confused beyond belief. "Why would they do that? Now of all times?"

Warcry shrugged. "I don't know, but somehow Knight' does."

The sniper grimaced at the blatant reminder of why she was there. "It's from before you all learned of our existence. Well before. Markmaker saved Shadowdancer's function, that's what this is all about."

"What happened?" The tank's optic ridges furrowed. This was the first he had ever heard mentioned of it, as most of the class three bots, even back when they were human, had collectively agreed to never speak of that period of time.

"The long and short of it is that Shadowdancer was sent out on some kind of sabotaged testing run just before you knew about us. She was given the wrong information, sent out with faulty equipment and a platoon of insubordinate soldiers to a Covenant held world. The mission was almost a failure, as the corrupt officers in ONI that had given it to her had intended it to be a complete one, but somehow she survived long enough on her own to sabotage and destroy all the targets given to her and to set up an emergency beacon. The reason the ONI officers did it was because they wanted to prove that the class three SPARTAN project failed to produce something like the class twos and get more funding for their own work instead of having it be funneled into the ORION Project. Shadowdancer was rescued by Markmaker, who ignored direct orders to do so, and he took her back to Reach so they could appeal to Dr. Halsey for her protection against anything like that from happening again."

Knightblade looked pained to be admitting to the story, and the shaking SPARTAN had to take a seat in front of the tank's desk.

"I was on the ship Mark' commandeered when he went for her, which is how I know all this. Because I was there, I saw how badly she was injured, and I also heard Shadowdancer tell Markmaker what it is she now owes him and his options with it. Because when a Covert Operations trained SPARTAN owes you their life you can call it in for any favor, but if you don't use it before you die, and you die of unnatural causes, that Covert Ops SPARTAN is bound to hunt down and destroy whoever killed you. Shockwave killed Markmaker. He might have not been the bot who pulled the trigger, but it was on his orders that the event of Mark's death occurred."

Warcry blinked, not as shocked as he knew he should be. "I knew they had history before they were placed on the _ATHENS,_ they got along too well for anything else to be possible, but... damn. So that's what's going on."

The sniper shot to her pedes. "I never told you a word of this."

She turned on her heel stabilizer and walked out without even a backwards glance to the rest of them.

"Shadowdancer and the rest of her SPARTANs are missing, to avenge your Second in Command." The Prime looked partially concerned and mostly dazed as he gazed at the seated tank. "Who was killed preventing the slaughter of Vos' seekers and civilians."

"Only because one of our own became too well known as something other than _what_ he is, and the wrong bot took interest." Rubbing a massive hand over his optics, Warcry blew out a sigh from his vents. "Is there anything you two would like to add to this cluster frag waiting to happen?"

Spotter nodded, smirking tiredly at the CO's disbelieving look. "I think the _ATHENS_ is alive, sir."

\V/

Three joors after Markmaker's deactivation, Nitro closed up shop.

Axel was nearly freaked out of his spark at how oddly the Praxian was acting, and from the deviation of the normal routine the mech had stuck to almost religiously ever since he started living with him.

Even as the bounty hunter watched, the demolitions specialist secured what little was valuable in the shop's main room, turning to him and throwing him the digital key-cards that went to the locks. "If you want to open while I'm gone, you can. I'll be back... eventually."

Axel didn't have time to question the SPARTAN, as the Praxian used the time he was fumbling with the stack of cards to silently leave him standing alone in the shop before he looked up again.

(ooo000ooo)

They met up outside of Simfur's city limits according to the prearranged time and location the XO had sent out using an untraceable data burst method of transmitting information.

Shadowdancer was the first, closely followed by Orpheus. Rook and Trickflip arrived nearly together after Drax did, and they waited silently for the last bot slated to show up. They had no reason to discuss what was going on, as all of them knew what was going to happen and that they were probably in a massive amount of trouble with Warcry.

Nitro cautiously approached them once he arrived in range to see them standing there with his own optics. Even if he was well acquainted to the point of younglinghood training companions with two of the Covert Operations bots he didn't want to get in their way.

The XO pinned him with a flat stare, and he finally got why the other SPARTANs and other bots that met her were so intimidated with the femme he thought he knew well as she demanded in an icy tone, "Which way?"

Nitro pointed in the exact direction, and the five of the disappeared from sight. He could see the tracks they left behind in the sandy ground that was under pede, and he followed that more slowly than he normally traveled.

They had him blow a hole into the underground labyrinth of Shockwave's, purely as a distraction as they entered in the regular way straight through the main hole in the ground, even if Drax nearly had to remove his own wing plates to get in without being noticed.

The distraction did as it was supposed to do, clearing out the bulk of the guards out of their way.

Eschewing the use of their ranged weapons they relied on the melee abilities they had, the Covenant sword and dagger as well as their hands and pedes, to take out the remainder in their way.

Shockwave didn't even hear them coming. He had been packing up to leave, as he decided that pressing his luck by staying would be against any survival programming he had.

Shadowdancer kicked in his door, and the others split up to ensure no bot came back early and interrupted the two of them as the XO 'discussed' the consequences of his actions to the Decepticon Military Commander.


	24. Chapter 24

Shadowdancer placed Shockwave's helm down on one of the scientist's old worktables, wiping her claws clean on a rag she had found in a random container when Rook came up to her.

Even as easygoing as the saboteur normally was, the barest hint of her normal humor was gone from her optics and frame. "Got a moment, Shadow'?"

"Since we're waiting on the mechs to finish clearing out this den of metal, yeah. You already knew that."

Rook shrugged as she leaned up against the table the severed helm was on. "There's been a few rumors floating around Spotter's part of the link. I know why you haven't linked up again, but you may wish to hear them before going back to Iacon."

"Who said I was going to the Autobots?" Blinking her optics at the saboteur, the Praxian stopped cleaning her hands and gave her subordinate her full attention.

"Only the orders you gave Orpheus." The gray painted femme gave her a half-sparked grin, one that didn't reach anything other than her lip plates. "If you intended to go straight back to Gygax, you would have delivered this souvenir yourself."

She flicked one finger joint off the decapitated helm.

"Okay, you may have a point." The femme arched her optic ridge and turned her attention back to the rag in her hand, knowing the saboteur would continue whether she asked or not.

"First one is that we all went insane with Mark's... deactivation." A hint of real amusement laced the other femme's tone at that, and kept there as she continued. "The second is that you somehow died and came back, something that had to do with our life expectancy as humans, and the third stated that you've pulled the rest of us to become Decepticons so you can tear the faction apart from the inside out."

Shadowdancer snorted and shook her helm, throwing the dirty rag into a far corner. "Wow, we have no imagination at all do we?"

"I'm more interested in the second one, myself." Rook pinned her superior with an old fashioned look. "Spill. What happened after you crashed?"

"I... don't really know."

Setting her claws on the same table, the tactician placed her weight on them as she leaned forward to stretch out her back cables.

"It was... almost like before I was still human staring out of my MJOLINER armor, now some filter has been removed and I can concentrate better." She tilted her helm to the saboteur. "I no longer lose focus when running more than four programs, and everything seems sharper."

"That's it?"

"That's why I'm going to Iacon." Shadowdancer straightened up, smiling faintly at the gray femme. "There are only three medics, and four other non-medic bots, I would trust looking through my systems to see what's different. Ratchet, Refit, and Xenon, as well as Knightblade, Spotter, Wheeljack, and Perceptor."

"Perceptor, really?"

"I like what Knight' has to say about him." Shrugging, the Praxian picked up the helm to take to the assassin. "Besides, he's been dealing with parsing out the systems of one of our own. I wonder how I compare."

\V/

Drax arrived in Iacon just in time to see Tigerstripe and Spotter being besieged by the seeker council over his location.

The aerial tank was absolutely relieved to hear from him, and passed on that he was arriving to the seekers that were demanding his position. By the time he had hit the ground; Spotter looked irritated, Hailstorm looked positively frazzled, Lunias was as concerned as she ever got, Lightning and Whiteout were completely torqued, and Quicksilver was nowhere to be seen.

The tricolored seeker femme turned on him the moment he regained his bipedal form. "Where the frag have you been! We haven't seen even a transmission from you since the city collapsed! I've been trying to keep rumors about your deactivation under the city to a minimum, but when you're nowhere to be found it's not that slagging easy!"

"Did 'stripe tell you that Markmaker was the one deactivated, not me?"

Hailstorm's vocalizer reset itself with a shocked sounding squeak.

The Air Commander arched an optic ridge at his trine mate, who just shrugged in reply with a flick of his wing plates. "We didn't know what you wanted done about the deactivation lists from Vos, so we haven't sent it out yet. There were a few Enforcers that didn't make it along with him, some of who came face to faceplate with some Cons before Mark' took the city down."

Catching on to what he wasn't saying, Drax frowned in thought. Traditionally, SPARTANs were not listed as KIA, even when it was obvious that the SPARTAN in question was deader than a hunk of rock. "I'll have to talk to Warcry about that... what else do you have for me?"

"Just where the seekers are going to go now, and..." shuffling around the data pads he was struggling with, Spotter slipped one out and handed it off to his trine leader, "a lot of seekers have expressed their intent on joining up with the Autobots, but Optimus is making them wait a little while before officially adding them to the rosters. We've got a... a lot of questions whether or not to build a new city or try and integrate with a different one."

"Alright then," he spared a scowl to the pad he now held, then looked up at the council standing around him, "Hailstorm, alert those that need to be about the deactivations. Lighting, get the list of who's all trying to join the Autobots, and talk to them about it. See if they're joining for revenge or because they really want to. Whiteout, ask around and see what's more popular, making a new city or finding an older one to live in. You two find Quicksilver and see what he's up to. Scratch that, 'stripe, go find Quick'. Spot'. _ATHENS_. Now. Stay here, Lunias, and calm whichever seekers you can."

Then, just because there really were questions on whether he was functioning or not, Drax took the long way around to meet up with the SPARTAN-Bot Commander.

Lightning, Spotter, and Tigerstripe instantly split off to their assigned tasks without another word, and Whiteout left after a moment of computation of where to start. Hailstorm blinked in shock again as she and the space capable femme were left in the courtyard alone. "I... oh, dear. I'll have to tell Dawnglider that..."

"Death may come to us all, Hail'." Patting the smaller seeker femme on the helm, the only part of her that the larger seeker could reach, the black and red seeker lowered herself to sit on the ground and raised her optics to the sky. "Even these SPARTANs."

\V/

Orpheus let himself into the Decepticon base of Gygax's, merrily whistling to himself as he walked through the halls. He found Blackout, and Scorponok by default, in one of the workrooms near the back of the base working on the list of known SPARTANs.

He startled the slag out of the mech when he commented idly behind the helicopter. "The SPARTAN in Kaon at the moment is actually Trickflip. Fragger's a cheerful son of a glitch."

Blackout's intakes wheezed from the scare, and the hacker sent wide optics to the assassin behind him as his drone chittered in concern under his console.

"Make some slagging noise, mech! You nearly sent me to the Pit doing that." He pushed away from the computer and turned the chair enough to see the dark mech. "Back already?"

"Already done with what we needed to do." Orpheus shrugged, as if to say what else would he have to do. "Problem is, Shadow's not back yet, so I need you to deliver something for her."

"Wait, what?"

"Shadow' has a slight problem, and there are only three medics certified to look at our systems on Cybertron." Setting a leaking box down into the mech's hands, the SPARTAN saluted him as he turned and made for the door. "So, since Lord Megatron ordered me to return with her, I'll stay at her bar until she's back."

\V/

Shadowdancer arrived in Iacon alone, nearly at the end of the orn, and she made it into the base and almost to Warcry's office before any bot in the base noticed her. To her everlasting amusement, Prowl spotted her before Jazz did. "Shadowdancer, is there a problem?"

Not connected to any of the information networks that she normally was, the tactician for the SPARTANs didn't really know how to answer that one. "Possibly. I need to talk to Warcry though. I take it he's in his office?"

"Ya got dat right, femme." The silver saboteur had his pedes kicked up on the ex-Enforcer's desk, grinning broadly. "Was real torqued with Drax for somethin'. Know anythin' about it?"

"I might." She allowed, giving them a small grin of her own. "But that's for another time, mech. See you two later."

Wiggling her claws at them, the Praxian femme left the corridor that the Autobots' kept main division offices in and traveled down to the unit leader offices a level down. Drax was nowhere to be seen by that time but the tank was still in his office, scowling with ill humor at the vid screen on his desk.

He looked up briefly at her knock, and transferred his scowl from the equipment to her. "Finally. I was beginning to think you really did go cracked."

"We've never set up any alternative standing orders for what happened when your orders conflicted with interest of another Division." Shadowdancer calmly took one of the seats before the tank's desk.

Blinking at the femme, Warcry scowled harder at her for her side stepping the issue. "And in hindsight, that was fragging stupid of me. What's really slagged up was that by the time I thought of it you were already operating on your own, and took your fragging part of the unit with you. Care to tell me what else the Covert Ops apparently are expected to do on their own without higher orders?"

"There isn't much left. The Covert Ops didn't really operate with others, so our traditions that included outsiders had to be made up ourselves." She shrugged, flicking her door-wings at him in an apology. "I should have... Mark' and I should have told you ourselves, but since you haven't asked what it was all about I take it Knightblade told you what happened long ago."

"Yeah, that's the only reason I'm not yelling." The tank gave up on trying to work, leaning back in the chair that had a permanent indentation from his cannon. "I get it, at that point it was to honor Markmaker. But really, Shadowdancer? You're my third, if you don't tell me slag there are going to be problems."

"So, I'm staying the Third in Command?" At his exasperated look, she shrugged again. "I figured you might be mad enough to put Orpheus in my place and stick me with a rank I don't want."

"Galeforce gets a bump to the 2IC. Who is cursing out your aft, by the way." Warcry was smirking by that time, lacing his hands and placing them behind his helm. "Figured we'd keep to the old military formula. Worked well enough before, so why frag up a good thing?"

"A Staff Sargent... ouch." She returned the smirk with a thin grin. "I can just imagine he's not pleased with me. Are you going to pull him from Yuss?"

"Might as well. Quick's got Blurr up to speed on what's going on, and he's remarked that the mech is worse at rambling than Rook's Bluestreak. Apparently, he does it in high speeds." Warcry sighed, inspecting the Praxian. "Clears up a few questions I had about you, the whole 'I don't want command' bit and why it was the two of you never needed to have a conversation to know what you both wanted. Going to suck slag without that mech's experiences now."

They fell silent after that, each thinking through what the other tank's deactivation meant for the rest of them. After a few breems, the SPARTAN-Bot CO stirred himself again. "You should know; I've tossed out the tradition of marking down the death of one of our own as MIA. Mark', and the other few Enforcers that will never leave Vos, are now listed as KIA, to be posted at the start of next cycle."

"I take it that was for Dawnglider's benefit?" Shadowdancer smiled softly, as it wasn't very well known that the tank and seeker had been involved for a while even within the unit. "False hope and all that?"

"Something like it." Frowning softer himself, the tank lowered his massive hands to his desk and tossed her a data pad that contained the list of deactivated Enforcers. "She was damn near crushed to hear about him."

"I can imagine."

He watched her page through the official report of Vos' fall thoughtfully. "Silentforce passed on something that's got the full attention of the rest of us. Something about Knightblade being half right and you saying something about a reset."

"I did, did I?" A secretive half smirk pasted itself across her face plate, and she raised her optics from the pad just enough to catch his expression. "He's right. I did, and I'm due to see both the medics and Knight' after we're done here. So if there is anything else?"

"What are you really doing in Gygax?" He growled at her laugh. "Common, Shadow'. It's got to be good if you've committed more than just yourself to it. With Orpheus now there, it's gotta mean you're ready to _really_ screw with the Cons."

Shadowdancer got up to her pedes, still laughing. "You'll see when I'm done. I'll see you later, Warcry."

\V/

Refit sniffled miserably in the medic's office, but she refused to leave the Medical Bay even for a breem. Neither Ratchet nor Xenon could get the reason the normally bubbly femme was so unhappy from her, but Knightblade would scowl in their direction when they asked.

The Head Medic of Iacon was also grumbling under his intakes about the number of bots loitering about, as Wheeljack and Perceptor were also there with no idea why. The scientist had also spoken the least amount any bot there had heard from him since their initial meeting with the mech, and all the inventor would do when asked about that was snicker to himself.

Shadowdancer's arrival had the once former AI turned medic up and out of the office in a flash. "I was so worried! I thought you might have died with Mark'!"

She crashed into the SPARTAN femme, nearly taking them both off their pedes.

The tactician patted her on the back awkwardly. "I'm sorry, 'fit. But one of the others could have told you I was still functioning."

"Why aren't you connected to the up-link? I don't think you've ever had it off since you found the programming for it." Refit pulled back just as fast and led the 3IC over to one of the repair berths. "Is there anything that no longer works right? Are you feeling okay since you crashed?"

"WHAT!" Both femmes winced when Ratchet came barreling out of the office, glaring at the both of them. "When the frag did that happen!"

"When Markmaker deactivated." Shadowdancer walked the rest of the way to Refit's chosen repair berth on her own as the little medic gathered her tools. "It also... when I rebooted, there were a few changes. That's why I didn't reconnect to the link, 'fit. I would like to know what is gone and what is still there before I do so."

Stalling in the aisles between the berths, and thanking every lucky star he knew of that the bay was empty except for them, the yellow medic processed that. "When did he..."

"Vos collapsed, remember?" Knightblade and Wheeljack maneuvered around him, but Xenon steered the other medic to one side so he and Perceptor could reach the femmes. The sniper finished answering him as she helped the medic open the back of the XO's helm. "How do you think he managed that?"

Taking the diagnostic tool the ex-AI handed to her, the SPARTAN sharpshooter plugged it in to look at the other femme's programming while Perceptor peered over her shoulder joint.

\V/

Spotter frowned, more confused than anything.

The _ATHENS_ had followed him and Tigerstripe to Iacon, and parked itself in the bay they had used when the SPARTANs had last visited the Autobot base. He was currently wondering if there was an already established protocol when dealing with a ship that turned out to be alive that you and your fellow soldiers had been taking for granted for an entire vorn now.

As he was thinking, the _ATHENS_ lowered it's cargo bay ramp, in what the seeker took to be an open invitation to come aboard. After only a moment of hesitation, Spotter walked up the ramp, flinching only a little when it closed behind him.

He walked through the familiar halls silently, and shook his helm to himself as the bulkhead doors to the bridge opened on their own to admit him.

Thinking back about it now, that should have been the point he and the others caught on to what was going on. In fairness, they had a bit going on during that time, Drax was getting inspected for the Air Commander position and he and Tigerstripe had their own little projects occupying their processors.

Sitting down in his customary chair at the communications control console, he leaned back in his chair a bit more gingerly than he normally did and spoke out loud. "So... femme. Sorry, and all that."

The display screen before him lit up with words of their own.

_Why femme?_

"In human culture, ships are normally referred to as either femme nicknames or 'Baby'. Figured it'd be less insulting than 'sparkling' or 'youngling'."

_Why apologize?_

"For... uh... ignoring things." The seeker rubbed the back of his helm sheepishly. "Don't think we've ever properly thanked you, either. So thanks."

The computer banks hummed all around the circular bridge room, and Spotter took it to mean the ship was thinking. About what, he wasn't going to hazard a guess over, just in case he was wrong.

_Gratitude is not required. My repairs were seen to eventually, and maintenance was completed in a timely manner. That is all this ship requires to continue functions._

"Quite the military lady, then." He blinked, then grimaced when the memory file of the rip in the hull came back to haunt his processor. "Aw... frag. Forgot about that. Sorry."

_?_

"The... uh. When we got here. The tear in the hull's lower section."

_Was not threatening to the function of this ship. Repairs were seen to._

"Doesn't mean I can't feel bad about how long it took us..." Spotter frowned as he trailed off, and after a silent breem spoke up again. "You're not very talkative."

_Dialog is not necessary._

"No, but it's pleasant. Passes the time a bit." He finally took up his usual posture in the room, more relaxed now that he knew the ship wasn't irritated at them for not noticing anything off about her. Femmes were a bit weird like that. "I wonder if this is a Cybertronian thing, sentient ships. I also wonder if they have any ships to speak of... err, now anyways."

_Affirmative._

"What, really?"

 _This ship has traded virus firewall patches with a number of other ships while in low orbit and within the city designated Vos. The_ Vextor _, the_ Daring Atom _, and the_ Ixion _most recently, although the_ Ixion _is now stationed near the city designated Kaon at this time._

"Uh... wow. Thought that was automatic." Spotter sighed, wondering when he was going to stop feeling like an aft.

No time soon, he was sure. He should have checked that out, frag it all, he should have gone through the ship's computer banks with a fine toothed comb the moment they came online outside of Kalis.

"If you want, you can give me a list of all the slag you need done at any time. I'll be sure to let the others know to alert me if you can think of something."

_The offer is appreciated._

"You... uh... don't mind if I tell them you're... self-aware. Do you?"

_Negative._

"Right then." The recon scout got up to his pedes, tacking on a 'thank you' when the _ATHENS_ automatically opened the bulkhead doors to the bridge for him. "Have a... uh... have a nice orn, femme. I'll be back, erm... next cycle, I think."

\V/

Having gone the entire work shift without seeing her once, Impactor and Sandstorm paid Holdout's residence a visit. It was unusual for her not to at least inquire if it was alright for her to take some time off, and both Wreckers were mildly concerned about what had happened to make the normally punctual femme shrug off her usual working joors.

The tracker gave both of them a tired frown when she saw them, but invited them into her flat by stepping back from the open door and retreating to her couch. She slumped into it, letting her helm rest on the back and waving a limp hand at them both as they entered.

"It won't be on the news vids yet, but Vos was attacked and leveled completely earlier this cycle." She used the same hand to rub her optics. "Markmaker was deactivated, along with a few other Enforcers. The civilians got out alright, but the seekers have besieged Iacon and from what Rook tells me, we're about to get hit with the ground bound bots of the city that didn't go west to Praxus."

The Wrecker Commander flat out stalled in her entry way, but Sandstorm crossed the room in a few strides and sat next to her. "That's the one that was actually your brother, right?"

"Wait, I thought-"

"We have consecutive numbers."

Holdout raised her helm enough to give the one handed mech a weak grin.

"I'm four-five-eight, he was four-five-nine. In fact, Orpheus was the one who found us, and he gave us those numbers when it became obvious we had been trained like class three SPARTANs. Fragger knew about the class threes long before anyone else did. We've been everything but blood siblings to each other since before I can start recalling." The femme lowered her helm again, staring blankly at the ceiling. "I'm... uh... not all too sure what I feel now that he's gone..."

Impactor winced at the thought of a grief stricken SPARTAN on a rampage. He supposed it was a wise idea of the femme not to go to work that orn. "Is there anything..."

"You can do? Not really." Holdout pursed her lip plates thoughtfully. "He died saving bots, and taking out the enemy at the same time. I suppose it was a good death, worthy of a SPARTAN. He really liked his function as an Enforcer, and I don't think he would have wanted his deactivation to happen any other way."

Frowning, the Wrecker mech shook his helm even as Sandstorm silently sat by his courted femme. "That's a depressing way to look at it."

"You've got to remember that we were once human, and because of that we still have an organic view of death. It happens, no way to escape it when your time runs out." She laughed, a bit hoarsely. "Not really applicable to us now, I admit. I wonder what happens to us when we die? Is the human afterlife where we are bound, or the Well of Sparks?"

Neither mech answered her, letting her process that on her own. They couldn't have answered her even if they wanted to.

Impactor eventually left, remarking that he was going to put them on leave for a few cycles. Sandstorm simply sat there as long as she wanted him to.

Before they left the room for her berth, she remarked to him, "You know, Mark' liked you. Never got to say it to you before we left Iacon, but I asked him what he thought about us. He approved."

\V/

Ratchet had ordered a complete checkup of the XO's physical systems after he had gotten over his shock, as Refit, Xenon, and Perceptor took the data they had copied from Shadowdancer's CPU and battle computer and used the terminals in the medics' office to look it over. While Knightblade and Shadowdancer were out testing the Praxian's response times against what they had been just before they left Iacon for the first time, Spotter and Warcry joined them.

The main difference they found, between the XO primary programming now and from before, was that the damage done by the Decepticons' indoctrination virus had been erased and her OCD was much more apparent in the ordering of her processors.

"'Course, she's still mechicidal to a large degree, but the corrupted parts of her base programming have been restored." The silver and white seeker had his helm on his clawed hand as he watched the vid screen displaying the data as Refit paged through the information. "She wouldn't be Shadowdancer without the threat of violence behind her."

"Creator programming hasn't been touched." Xenon added thoughtfully from behind his desk.

"That makes no slagging sense." Having already dipped into his stash of high grade, the Head Medic of Iacon scowled at the room full of bots. "Look at her operating systems. Nearly all of them have been rewritten. Frag it all, I don't even think she's _seeing_ the same way as she used to. Why change all of that and leave the downloaded programming untouched?"

Warcry, the chair he was sitting in creaking under his weight, hazarded a guess. "Wasn't original?"

"So, if we're still going with our original theory, then the All Spark didn't know it was there, or going to be there, to change or improve it?" Refit tilted her helm to the side as she thought. "That would mean this was all set up to happen a long time ago. Looks like Knight' was half right. Shadow' did crash, but all the excess or redundant programs that caused the minor glitches have been either completely rewritten or deleted."

"Remains to be seen if that keeps the errors from popping up. Wonder if it was the reboot or the crash that triggered this?"

"No real way to know yet, Spot'." The little medic femme gave her pseudo creator a grin. "May just have to wait for the next one to drop and compare triggers."

"No." Warcry beat out Ratchet for vetoing that suggestion. "The next time this happens, I want it to be here. Even if it means we're going to have to _make_ one of us crash."

"Shadowdancer didn't say anything about any slagging warning signs when this hit her, 'fit. So, it could mean it will make your bots crash even in the middle of some fragging alleyway brawl. It would be safer, especially for the junkyard rejects in contested cities, if we did this here."

Refit frowned at them, disliking the idea immensely now that those points had been made to her. "So, who do we try this out on? The trine can't take another leave of absence from public view or the seekers here may panic, I don't have the same programming, and Shadow' already went through this. That just leaves you, sir, and Knightblade."

No one but Wheeljack was watching the scientist that had been working on compiling lists of changes in a data pad when the sniper's designation was brought up, so only the inventor saw how stiff the other Crystal City mech got at the suggestion of forcing his assistant to crash simply to attempt to recreate the results of the SPARTAN-Bots' XO's incident.

"I'll do it, 'fit. Knight' might be needed to help out if anything goes wrong." The tank paused, then frowned at the vid screen displaying the XO's altered programming. "Though I can't say I look forward to seeing what would make one of us crash."

"Start with a reboot then." Shadowdancer proposed as she and the sniper finally made it into the office. "Nothing said it was the crash that did this. That may have just been because one of our own was deactivated and I was pushing myself too hard beforehand."

"Yeah, but ma'am, reboots are normally done when new programming is introduced to a bot's primary programming." Refit got up and out of her chair in a blink of an optic, and she dashed to the XO's side to inspect the femme for any new damage from the SPARTANs' sparring. "You need a medic to do one."

"That just may mean you'll be doing a whole lot of traveling here shortly if it works." Shadowdancer put up with the subsequent inspection with the same patience she had displayed all cycle. "Let's start with the less damaging option before we go to the desperate one."

Knightblade paused thoughtfully in the doorway. "Makes a twisted amount of sense if you think of it. I don't think we've ever gone through a reboot, even when we came on-line outside of Kalis. And we definitely had different programming when we woke up compared to when we were put into Cryo-Stasis."

"Too bad the All Spark didn't give us a how to manual. 'What to do when your form has been hijacked and turned into another creature'." Refit giggled as she reattached the armor plates she moved to look at Shadowdancer's three motor relay systems. "That would have solved so many questions."

Each of the SPARTANs in the office gave the former AI a questioning look for that, but the older medics looked to each other.

"That's not a bad idea, 'fit. And you need a slagging personal project to present for your final medic exam. Why not write one about the medical issues you and the SPARTANs have encountered since you woke up?" Ratchet then turned to the SPARTAN officers in the room. "Unless you don't think by the time she's done writing the fragging thing you would be ready to inform the rest of Cybertron of what you are."

Shadowdancer shrugged her door-wings dismissively. "As long as you all don't mind sitting on it if we're not ready when you're done, then have at 'fit."

"Might help out, in a way." Warcry mused out loud. "She could publish it on the information nets at the same time we announce ourselves, or whatever we do, so the bots that want to take a look at us can."

Blinking, the XO frowned momentarily. "Subject to censoring, of course. We wouldn't want any bot trying to duplicate parts of us, now would we?"

Thinking on how to start, the ex-AI looked to her mentor. "Should I begin with the processors and CPUs verses organic brains, or bones to struts?"

"I'm still not entirely sure how your fragging conversion happened, and all the slagging consequences of it, so do the physical parts comparison later. Start by listing the basic information of each of your SPARTANs, functioning or not, and what happened to each of them after the All Spark hit the _ATHENS_. Which ones ended up as which frame type, and which ones deactivated for what reasons. I've got all that slag done, and you can look through it for your notes."

Wheeljack turned around, vocalizer fins flashing a bright green. "You can even use me and Percy as sources, given the work we've done in looking at Knight's systems and the stuff I did in replacing broken or cracked struts."

"Leave out our designations, 'fit." Warcry got to his pedes, intent on leaving now that the talk was turning very technical. "If it looks like our reception will be better than I fear, you can put those in afterward."

\V/

Silentforce proved to be rather good as a youngling herder, and as he got Kynaite set up for yet another trip out of the city. Zephyr pressed her luck with asking why they were leaving the city again from the dark green and black mech she had very little prior contact with.

"Look, we're going to a funeral... type thing." Orpheus blinked in confusion, then waved a hand at the helicopter dismissively. "Shadow' will be there, in fact she has to be as one of our commanding officers, and she'll be coming back with us from there."

He tilted his helm, in an action that the ex-Enforcer had learned to mean the SPARTAN before her was talking to some other bot of the unit.

"She said to inform you that it's another thing that will 'float your ballasts'."

Zephyr snorted harshly at the reminder of how Shadowdancer got her out of the city the first time. "Fine, I'll... set up the signs again to say the bar will be closed for another fragging megacycle."

She rubbed the back of her helm as she walked off, wondering out loud how it was the bar was so successful when they kept closing every so often.

Snickering, Orpheus passed on the helicopter's muttering about the absent XO. When he could no longer hear the femme, he turned his attention to one of the three frequent visitors over the last two cycles watching him deal with the ex-Enforcer. "Soundwave. Need something?"

The Decepticon mech inspected him from helm to pede, but said nothing.

Returning the inspection, the assassin tilted his helm back and grinned wickedly. "If you think you can keep your trap shut, I'll invite you along. Just so you know, though, there are a few Autobots that are to be there. If you get through this without pissing off the boss femme, she might trust you with a bit more about us."

Soundwave hesitated, staring intently at the SPARTAN. He still couldn't get a read on their processors, so he didn't know without having to ask why it was the assassin was doing what he was doing. "Inquiry: Why?"

"It'll torque Shadow' off." Orpheus shrugged as he stacked up chairs on tables. "And I've been way to helpful these last few megacycles. It's about time for me to do something that annoys the slag out of her."

The Decepticon snorted, but as the assassin finished setting the furniture away and Silentforce came down the stairs with Kynaite, he agreed to the SPARTAN's terms.

Looking between the two Decepticons, the bodyguard had an uneasy feeling about the upcoming few cycles.

\V/

Shadowdancer winced as Knightblade removed the last plug from her CPU and closed up her helm one last time.

The XO rubbed the panel that had been pried open more in the last few joors than in the entire last vorn, but turned to her fellow SPARTAN femme with an inquiring expression. "Now what?"

"Spot' and I've been comparing your processor operating programs to what they were before, the copy that Ratchet made of your programming after the virus scare that is." The sniper quickly did something with the data she had taken, and showed the XO on the data pad she held in one hand. "I think I've found why you crashed."

"Over stressing myself?"

"Nope. Two conflicting programs were fighting to take precedence, the strain of which caused a lag in your overall efficiency. Adding the fact you ruthlessly froze and dumped the programs you didn't need any more to provide more space for your battle computer to eat up, and then got hit the worst with the feedback from Mark's... Mark's deactivation, you just stacked error upon error until the entire thing was enough to bring your CPU crashing down." Knightblade sent a level glare at the Praxian. "Try some patience next time."

Shadowdancer snorted as she got to her pedes, intent on leaving the med bay before Ratchet heard why it was she had crashed. "We'll see. Now that you know how much it takes for one of us to crash, you going to start with War' as soon as we return?"

"It probably won't take as much to make the tank crash, ma'am." Subspaceing the data pad, it would be a bad thing to leave out in the Head Medic of Iacon's territory until after they were ready to start testing, the sniper followed the XO out of the medics' domain and into the halls of Iacon proper. "He doesn't have the same caliber processors as you do."

When Shadowdancer started snickering even as she led the way to the hanger the _ATHENS_ was in, her fellow SPARTAN femme sighed.

"He's right behind me, isn't he?"

"That I am." Warcry rested a heavy hand on his scientific lieutenant's shoulder joint. "What's all this about processors?"

Knightblade spared him a pained smile as he lifted his hand off her. "I've got the list of programs that collectively made Shadow' crash, just in case rebooting doesn't work with you."

"Ouch." The CO winced, and ignoring the weak giggle Refit was having at his expense, shook his helm at the femmes around him. "Here's to hoping that it's not going to be required."

"This is to be a small thing, right sir?"

Warcry raised a questioning optic ridge at his XO's back, then caught sight of the seekers waiting for the small group of SPARTANs in the hanger bay. "Drax?"

The Air Commander shot them an exasperated look from where he was surrounded by a number of seekers, most of whom seemed rather perturbed for some reason. Tigerstripe had Dawnglider and was escorting the rather lost looking seeker femme onto the _ATHENS_ , and Spotter was hanging back with both Lightning and Hailstorm.

Shadowdancer frowned, taking in the collection of seekers that were demanding to know just where it was that Drax had to be in various screechy tones, and flat out growled at the lot of them. "It's a fragging _funeral_ rite. For the bots that helped keep your collective afts together during the exodus, you tin winged, audio breaking _drones_! Now get lost, or I'll tear your slagging thrusters off myself!"

Drax laughed as the rather nervous seekers scattered under the full force of Shadowdancer's glare. "Thanks, ma'am."

"It's partially your fault." She scowled after them for a few more moments, letting those that were boarding in Iacon get on the ship before following with the Air Commander on her heel stabilizers. "You let them demand more of your time than you can spare, even if it is just after some sort of crisis, and they'll keep doing it mostly for no reason, just to say they had some of your time to whine."

"I'd highly doubt they would actually say 'whine' to another seeker."

"I don't care." The XO sighed, standing in the hallway of the lower levels of the _ATHENS_. "I have to apologize to the ship. Do what you will."

"Wait, what?" Drax snapped his helm over to the Praxian femme, just in time to see her rubbing the bridge of her olfactory sensor sheepishly.

"I kicked Trickflip through one of the bulkheads." Even as he stared at her, incredulous, she just seemed to get more flustered about the incident that had occurred a vorn before. "It's rather rude to do to an innocent third party, and seeing as Spotter insists that the _ATHENS_ will respond as long as we talk to... _her_ on the bridge or when there is a vid screen for her to manipulate in order to respond, it is something that I need to do."

She passed by him stiffly, bypassing the lower deck engine room they had turned into a rec room where the seekers had crammed themselves into for the stairwell that lead to the upper deck and the bridge. Spotter was at his usual place at the communications console, picking through and sorting the data that was dumped into the _ATHENS_ ' computer banks when they had become irrelevant to the situation.

With a nod to the widely grinning seeker, the XO crossed her arms behind her and under her door-wing joints. " _ATHENS_ , I have an incident you may wish to seek reparations from..."

\V/

Even as Bluestreak fretted over the location of their favorite gray femme, Smokescreen rolled his optics and took another swallow of his energon.

"Look, Blue, this isn't the first time Rook's up and left for some reason or another. She left behind both those two Autobots, Sideswipe and Sunstreaker, so that should mean she's going to come back shortly." The Enforcer pointed to the vid screen in the corner of the Enforcer Station showing a popular newscast vid channel, trying to distract his brother. "It probably has something to do with her 'siblings', so settle down and try worrying about something-"

"Err... Smokey?" Blaster lowered the cube of energon he had been drinking for his late cycle fuel, wide optics locked on said vid screen. "You may want to see this..."

Concerned by the amount of fear in the other Enforcer's vocalizer, both Praxian brothers turned their attention to the screen to catch the beginning of the newscast.

" _... of Vos. There has not been an official statement from the Seeker Council yet about how many of their numbers have been deactivated in defense of the City of Seekers, but rumors abound that it was the ground bound 'brother' of the Seeker Community's new Air Commander that led the forces of Enforcers to an explosive battle that collapsed the city... This just in. The Autobots stationed in Iacon have given sanctuary to the displaced seekers and have just recently released the first of the list that recorded the number of deactivated Enforcers of Vos. Staff Sargent Markmaker, Sergeant Brawn, Lieutenant Jailhouse, and Lieutenant Redrail are the first confirmed reported deactivations of the city since it's collapse. We of the news team of Central Reporting would like to take the next breem in silence in remembrance of the fallen heroes of the city who have given their sparks to defend those who could not..._ "

"Uh... Blaster?" The Praxian Enforcer was scrutinizing the vid shots of the four Enforcers named, optics lingering on the vid file of the tank. "Markmaker... isn't that their 2IC?"

The communications expert dropped his chair to all four legs, using his specialized equipment to try and contact one of the soldiers in question. "Oh... holy slag... yeah, it was."

"Was?" Bluestreak peered over to the mech, worried. "What do you mean 'was'?"

"As in, no longer functioning, Blue." Blaster shook his helm, looking with still wide optics over to the Praxian brothers. "The newscast didn't lie, Markmaker's been deactivated. It's all over the Enforcer nets, that was the official deactivation reports from the city from those who either can't or won't report back in, and Rook just confirmed it herself. She's on her way back to the city to pick up her two mechs, and then they're on to Vos to bid their 'brother' a final farewell."

Neither Praxian said another word, they both bolted out of the Enforcer Station like Unicron himself was on their afts. The communications expert collected his cassettes just as fast, reported in to Onyx that they were taking leave to pay their respects to an Enforcer they knew from Vos, and went after them to catch up to Rook.

\V/

Axel watched the same news vid, and a few scary possibilities occurred to him that didn't to the Enforcer friends of the SPARTANs' saboteur.

The timing matched up, the Praxian had left about three to four joors after the collapse of the city, now all he needed was to ask the demolitions specialist exactly what it was he left last cycle to do. As he was waiting he straightened up the storefront a small bit, not that there was much to do seeing as they closed early last cycle and he highly doubted they were opening this one either.

Nitro finally traipsed into the shop area a few breems after he started working, raising an optic ridge at the ex-bounty hunter's handiwork. "...and you're doing what?"

"Passing the time, mech." Axel straightened up and turned to glare at his new employer. "What the slag did you do last orn? I saw the news vids, and I can guess what happened, but where the frag did you go?"

The Praxian mech gave him a searching look, but after a few moments nodded his helm and beckoned him to follow. "Common. I'll show you."

\V/

By the time the _ATHENS_ had arrived back to the location where Vos once lay, the rubble of the higher levels of the city had slid to the base of the cliffs it once stood on.

Rook was waiting for them at the northern section of the city, the clearest part of the ruins accessible to the Prowler Class ship. She had with her both the Autobot twins and three other mechs, who Shadowdancer raised an optic ridge at.

The saboteur shrugged, still mostly subdued since the death of one of their own. "They insisted. They are also not the only ones inviting themselves along."

Something in the other Covert Ops femme's vocalizer warned the XO, and the Praxian femme pinned her fellow femme with a hard glare as the seekers disembarked from the _ATHENS_. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Orpheus said he invited a friend of yours."

Shadowdancer's gold optics widened and the femme visibly flinched. "He didn't..."

"Some mech by the name of Soundwave... funny, but I thought that was a Decepticon's designation..."

"Don't be cute, Rook. You know it is." The XO sighed, rubbing the pads of her claws against her temples. "That fragger... Can't kill him, can't work without him..."

"Who are we talking about now?" Both femmes minutely stiffened at the sound of their CO just behind them.

The saboteur scrambled in her processor to find an excuse they could pin the conversation about, when the tactician turned around and stated coolly, "Orpheus, who else could we be discussing? Before we begin, sir, I have a small little issue to clear up with you."

She took the tank's arm and led him away, to a relatively deserted part of the cleared section of rubble.

Rook whistled to herself as she watched them walk away, a hint of her normal humor back in her spark. "Ball bearings of titanium, that one..."

"Rook... did you say a Decepticon was coming here?" Bluestreak had come up while she had been talking to the other Praxian, causing the saboteur to start in surprise.

"Holy Pits, Blue. When did you get sneaky?"

Checking the surroundings to ensure there would be no other listeners, something she wryly acknowledged that she should have done in the first place, Rook dropped to her knee joint and took the merchant by his shoulder joints.

"He's just a friend of Shadow's, not that she would admit that any bot not a SPARTAN would be a friend, and he's coming here as her moral support." The saboteur blinked a few times, with a grin stretching her lip plates. "Or something like that. He'll behave himself, Shadow' will see to that."

Peering over her shoulder joints in return, the Praxian had to admit the femme was a little scary. And if the SPARTANs didn't care that he was coming, than he supposed he didn't either.

Warcry was not as blasé over what was going to happen in a few short joors. Thankfully, at least from Shadowdancer's perspective, the tank was only irritated in the assassin's direction. They at least got Orpheus to extract a promise from Soundwave to conceal his Decepticon faction insignia from the seekers and Neutrals with the SPARTANs in Vos.

With that matter cleared up, and the rest of their number that would be there on the horizon, the SPARTANs started preparing for what they were out there to do.

They gathered a few odd items together as Holdout entered the ruins to find the largest part of Markmaker that she may; Warcry fetched the cannon the Enforcer had favored in life, Galeforce had some of his tools in hand, and Shadowdancer had some lengths of chain with two engraved metal tags clenched in her own claws.

By the time the tracker had returned with a heat warped, sooty armor plate etched with their coat of arms in gold and silver solder, the symbol they all had etched into their right arm armor plate whether or not the exposed side bore their painted symbol or not, the rest of the unit had reached the cleared section in the rubble.

Warcry and Titan had embedded the cannon's muzzle deep into the rock, and Galeforce had disabled the Forerunner weapon so no bot could come across it and use it without destroying the heavy weapon. Stepping up to the cannon, the XO unchained the smaller circle of chain from the longer length and attached it and it's corresponding tag to the trigger of the weapon. When she returned to the tank's back left, all the SPARTANs saluted the edifice they had created for their 2IC.

They broke up after that, the farther flung SPARTANs intent on returning to their cities before their absences became noticeable and the others not wanting to dwell on the fate of the dead.

Shadowdancer spared a glance for the lone Decepticon among them but she approached Dawnglider first. "I know it wasn't well known, but I know you and Mark' were... well, involved."

The miserable seeker femme nodded slowly, staring at the heavy weapon she had teased the tank of obsessing over just megacycles ago. "He asked me to move to Tyger Pax with him... I said no."

"I understand." The XO awkwardly knelt next to the seeker, holding out the longer length of chain to her. As close as she was, Dawnglider could see the tag on the end had some strange writing on it. "This is half of Markmaker's dog tags. We can't wear them as we are now, so we locked them in a safe on board the _ATHENS_ for safekeeping. They also are keyed to open up our personal lockers. Holdout passed on clearing out her brother's stuff, she said that right should be yours. Once you feel up to it... that is."

The seeker femme took the chain and the lone tag, peering at the small flat metal token and reading the Cybertronian glyph that had been added recently. It spelled out Markmaker's name, and she assumed the strange stark symbols on top spelled out his SPARTAN number and a few other bits of information.

Shadowdancer stood up and made her way to where both Silentforce and Orpheus where standing with Soundwave, and she dug her claws into the assassin's chest plates as she backed him up to some shattered building foundation.

"You are playing with acid, my mech." She twitched her claws, catching a few sensitive wires in the tips and ratcheting up the tension she held on them. "What were you processing, or were you even running a common sense routine to begin with?"

With the tactician glaring into his own optics, even if she was shorter than him, the assassin tried to meet her gaze, but dropped it after a tense moment. "That if we're starting, might as well jump in the deep end."

"Don't do it again." She knocked him back into the steel hard, leaving an impression of his frame and armor behind. Turning back to the other two mechs from Gygax, she frowned at Soundwave. "We're almost done here, and if you promise not to disturb any here I'll answer whatever question you can pose to me later. Just, don't give out your designation."

With that, she left them to collect her youngling from Zephyr, who almost jumped from the helicopter's hands to greet his carrier after her few cycles of abstinence from his function.

Rook wandered up to the three of them as the twins held a conversation with the Wrecker mech and her Enforcers kept close to her merchant guest, inspecting the blue mech with a much restored smirk as she sang out loudly, "Some bot's in trouble!"

"Frag you, femme." Orpheus crossed his arms over his chassis and glared at her even as Silentforce rolled his optics at the both of them, walking off to see how Refit was doing and leaving them to bicker as usual.

"You should have seen how stiff the boss femme got when she heard what you invited along." The saboteur slid past the assassin, circling the Decepticon with interest. "Don't think I've seen her that disturbed since she found Kynaite. What did you screw with to get that reaction from her?"

Soundwave warily watched the femme as she looped around him. Like the Praxian femme herself, most of the others that stood around this destroyed place also computed in another language entirely. There were only a few that thought in Cybertronian, but those he remained away from as to not reveal his faction to them.

"None of your fragging business, Rook. So get lost." Scowling even harder as he caught sight of Trickflip getting nearer, the Decepticon SPARTAN knocked his helm back against the building. "Perfect, the protective older brother has come to annoy the slag out of us."

"Slag you, Orph'." The infiltrator spat at him while he took his time looking the other Decepticon over. "I was just curious. Besides, Shadow' can take care of herself, and if she thought I was trying anything like that, she'd tear my fuel lines out."

Looking between the three of them, the communications specialist decided standing his ground would work better for him than asking any questions, especially since Shadowdancer had promised to answer any he came up with.

The gray femme eventually left after a few more verbal pokes at him, called away by two Praxian mechs to return to whatever city she had come from. Trickflip went with her, as some acquaintance they shared had requested his presence. Silentforce eventually wandered back with a data pad from the medics, smacking the assassin on the helm with it when he tried to peer at what it contained.

Eventually even the seekers left, leaving only Warcry and Galeforce with Shadowdancer next to Markmaker's monument. After they had finished what it was they needed to do, the three of them split with the tank and engineer walking up the ramp to the _ATHENS_ , and Shadowdancer returning to her three mechs with Kynaite in her arms.

"Right, questions. Do I need to answer them here, or will another place work?"

"Required Location: Negative."

"So you're ready to ask, then?" At his nod, she frowned down to the tired bundle of wires and metal in her arms. "'naite, time for a nap. Go with 'force for a bit, I'll be right here where you can see me. I promise."

The bodyguard took the squirming youngling, and used his other hand to drag the assassin to the other side of the leveled rubble.

Shadowdancer turned to Soundwave with a set expression. "Ask away, then."

"Inquiry: SPARTAN-Bot."

"Military unit. Borderline illegal and highly experimental. Code named ORION Project, but not much else is known of it."

"Inquiry: Number in Unit."

"Sixteen fighting fit bots, three not SPARTAN-Bot in frame but assets to the unit anyways, and Kynaite." She blinked as the Prowler Class Ship took off from the far end of the cleared spot. "And... err... the ship over there."

Soundwave thought over his next question carefully. "Inquiry: Division."

A small smile quirked the femme's mouth components. "You already know that. Covert Operations."

"Reason: Validation." She rolled her optics at him, but didn't say anything else. "Inquiry: Military Job Class."

"Physiological warfare, tactical planning." She flicked her claws out and inspected them. "Next."

"Unit Designation: Acid Green and Black Mech."

Shadowdancer blinked up at him, surprised. "Trickflip?"

"Inquiry: Military Job Class."

She snorted and waved her claws at him. "Infiltration."

Soundwave got the impression that the femme was playing a game with him, seeing what it was that he was interested in. The result of which, he couldn't tell if he was wining or losing. "Unit Designation: Gray Femme."

"Rook."

"Unit: Relation."

"Mmm. She's like my sister, but in reality she's my closest femme friend ever since we met up a galaxy ago."

He had her attention again, and he had enough information to give to Lord Megatron to validate his leave of absence, so he tried for some bits of random information. "Origin: Chess."

"Humans. A game that encouraged the development of tactical planning in their younglings."

"Reason: Bar."

"Income. Bitlit has a few expenses being a gladiator couldn't cover." Arching an optic ridge, Soundwave regarded her with some surprise, as he hadn't known that bit of her history. She spotted his expression and grinned. "I was what amounted to being a paid killer, and gladiator fighting was well within my skill sets. Then I branched out into property owning to give me more time, and then got the bar for something to do while I earn the credits my young mech needs for both medical repairs and Youth Sector schooling."

"Reason: Youngling."

"Technically, he was a sparkling when I found him." This time, Shadowdancer frowned herself. "I honestly don't know what made me save him the first time, but the second I will claim as my own fault. I still have no idea what I'm doing with him, but he seems happy with me."

"Intent: Gygax."

Pursing her lip plates, the Praxian femme shrugged.

"Mostly Intel gathering. Letting Kynaite function in someplace not going to be contested for the next few vorns. And... I have this little special project..." She stroked a claw down the side of her jaw plate. "That I think I may recruit you for... but that remains to be seen. Are you done with your questions?"

He inclined his helm to her, unsure of what else he could have asked.

"Then we should get going. There is a lot of road between Vos and Gygax."

\V/

"She _deactivated_ Shockwave?"

Nitro rolled his optics. "Figures you'd be stuck on that and not the whole... you know, took down a blasted _city_ with him."

The Praxian mech had taken Axel farther into the destroyed city of Vos, looking for something that he refused to clarify to the ex-bounty hunter. While he was searching the rubble, he had told him of what occurred to level the city and why his presence had been demanded last cycle.

"Yeah... but _she_ killed Shockwave!"

The demolitions specialist gave up trying to look for whatever was left of Markmaker's frame besides bits of armor plating, pinning the mech behind him with a flat look. "She's killed lots of things, from Covenant Prophets to fragging Brutes to even a decent number of bots that have gotten a bit too violent for her in Gygax. Why is this one so shocking?"

Axel blinked, making a mental note to ask about what a Prophet and a Brute was, and thought about that question. After a breem of processing the idea he decided it was more the issue that he had no defined role anymore, seeing as the SPARTANs wouldn't need him to pass information on to Shockwave. Not that he was disparaging over that point, the one and only time he had seen the scientist, it had given him nightmares for a while.

"Now what?"

"What do you mean?"

"What use do you have for me?"

"Oh." Nitro looked up from a pile of twisted metal at him. "That's... a really good question. I've got nothing, and while Shadow' will eventually remember you and give you a goal to work towards, you may as well use the time doing whatever it is you need to do. Ya know, visit your family unit, say hi to friends, those type of thing."

"Only family unit still operating was my cohort brother, Copper."

"Ah... ouch." Having impaled his hand when the ex-bounty hunter said that, the SPARTAN yanked out the length of metal and stood up, turning to face the mech. "Your brother was the one you thought had sold you out to Shockwave back before you started working with us?"

"Yep."

Nitro rubbed the tear against his thigh plating. "...sorry."

"Eh." Shrugging the ex-bounty hunter started kicking over the smaller pieces of rubble. "So, what are we still doing here?"

"Making sure there are no big pieces remaining of our deactivated tank." Keeping his injured hand closed and close to his chassis, the Praxian knelt down again and shifted through the twisted metal left behind. "Mark' was built to be sturdy. Even I'm not sure that four specially made grenades were enough to obliterate him."

"Four?"

"'Took the city with him' not ring any bells?"

"Um..." Axel looked around to where it was they were.

It was the remains of some type of factory, and even to his less than discerning optics, it looked like ground zero of whatever blast had happened. From the story the Praxian had told him they were supposed to be looking for an energon processing plant, and the burst liquid holding tanks that had been embedded into the walls said the SPARTAN had found the right place.

"Need any help?"

"Try shutting up and letting me look." Nitro flung some sharp bit of metal to the far wall, where it got stuck in the stone with half it's length sunk into solid rock. "And tell me if you spot anything blue, or blue- _ish_ that's not heat warped. It'll be a part of Mark's frame then."


	25. Chapter 25

Rook bid her mechs goodbye at the merchant district, taking Trickflip back to her dojo where she had left both Sideswipe and Sunstreaker with her poor students. The thought only gave her a small part of the amusement she would have normally felt at the idea of the two Autobot twins at the mercy of her gossipy classes, and she only had a half-sparked smirk on her face plate as she let herself into the modified warehouse.

The gold twin had her class surprisingly well in hand, still glowering at nearly everything and every bot, but she supposed wryly that was the reason the class had not degenerated into another mass gabfest yet. She saluted him from the door to let him know she was back, and the mech glared irritably at her and the mech behind her before continuing what he was doing with the beginning class when it became apparent she was going to have him finish before taking over again.

The silver twin was working out of a data pad in the study room, something he never had complaints about seeing as the work she gave him was taken from the missions she had run out in the Milky Way Galaxy and he found all of it fascinating. Especially the unusual manner that she commonly opted to use in order to complete her assigned tasks. He normally took careful notes of his own about how she had set up whatever trap or gotten around some security system as well as working out how he would approach the same thing.

Sideswipe glanced up from his latest story file, smirking wickedly at his SPARTAN mentor. "Ya know, femme? The weirdest slag I've ever heard is in the operation of yours with that incident about the politician, the flickering street lamp, and the 'cat' creature. Did he really process that you were some mutant hybrid _cat_ monster sent out to deactivate him?"

"Yep, damn near broke the record for the fastest fat human right afterwards, too."

The memory file widened her smirk, and she waved to the acid green and black mech following her into the room to take a seat.

"But my orders at the time was to let no one know about the SPARTANs, and that worked. Destroyed his credibility when he tried to explain the incident to anyone, so my work was done with just that." She sat down in her desk chair tiredly as Trickflip dropped onto the couch next to the Autobot. "I take it you've seen the news vids already?"

All humor fled from the room at her quiet question. The swordmech nodded as he set the data pad down. "Yeah, I'm sorry to hear about that, Rook."

She shrugged it off dismissively. "Death happens, Sides'. Including us... rather frequently."

She pressed back with her pedes, leaning the chair back to get a better view of the Autobot mech when she rested her helm on the back of her chair.

"There are a few consequences of that, some of which will affect you and your brother. First off, have you finished the tasks I've assigned you?"

Sideswipe nodded warily, tossing her the data pad that held his data work and notes she asked of him. "Jackknife works for a mech by the name of Innersight, an underground Intel trader and the slum lord of the merchant district. They've been after you because you've been training up what amounts to an entire army out of slum bots, most of which are fiercely loyal to you and the dojo simply because you didn't charge them to learn how to defend themselves. They, the bum bots, haven't been talking to any gang related bots because you refuse to teach them how to extort others better, and as such, neither Innersight nor Jackknife can get much about you without having that same red and gold mech that hang about here and risk annoying you and you offlining him."

"And where are they?" She had already known all of this. As a matter of fact after Jackknife had imposed on her hospitality and Bluestreak had been sparked-napped, she had followed him back out of the slums to find out who he reported to. It was still a good field test for the swordmech, and she had used it as such.

"Merchant's district. Where else could you go to buy anything and everything? Innersight has a store that serves a front to his little base creatively called the _Inner Workings_ ," Sideswipe's low opinion of the shop's name was mimicked by the two SPARTANs listening to him, "that sells some shoddily put together frame additions. Times to gain access are always the third and eighteenth joor of the cycle. Any other attempts activates a security measure that locks everything up for a set amount of time, three joors, and open up some escape tunnels to the underground. There are guards at the spots underground, as well as a high ranking prized gladiator fighter guarding the shop front."

"Password to get in?"

"It's 'to see what others may not', spoken in ancient Cybertronian while knocking three times on the shop clerk's counter."

Rook set the pad down, nodding in approval for the swordmech's work of the last few cycles. "Good. How would you get in without getting deactivated?"

Sideswipe hesitated at that question, and carefully asked, "Can I use Sunny, or not?"

"Give me a plan for both. You may not have him with you all the time."

"Right. Well, if I have my brother I would stick him underground, and rewire the alarm to keep it from locking everything up but leave it to open the tunnels. Pick a fight with the gladiator, let the shop clerk hit the alarms, and bolt to join Sunny underground and see what pops out." Smirking proudly at the snickers he earned from the SPARTANs, he continued with the other possible option. "Second, if I don't have my brother or any other bot nearby, Pose as a new informant, possibly by setting upon one of their new contacts allowed to use that shop as an Intel dump and impersonating him or her. Get in, corner whoever it is I'm after or grab whatever it is, trip the alarm to get out."

Rook pursed her lip plates and processed both plans of action. "Not bad, Sides'. Not bad at all. I want you to do so, using either your options or formulate another but run it by me first, and grab everything Innersight has on me. Don't leave a trace, mech. You do this perfectly, and you'll be mostly done here."

"Mostly?"

"Perceptor and Wheeljack are almost done with the upgrades you'll need to operate at levels close to our own." The saboteur laced her finger joints together and laid them on her chassis. "If Ratchet agrees, before you leave here you and Sunstreaker will get them first, come back here for field testing, then... then you'll both go to Polyhex."

Sideswipe sat bolt upright, staring hard at his mentor. "Polyhex? Why in the Unmaker's own name are we going there?"

"Assassination training." Trickflip waved one hand tiredly at the startled Autobot. "Orpheus is with the XO at Gygax at the moment, so you'll go to him there after he's done with what the XO has him tagged for and you're done here. With Markmaker's deactivation, Shadow's no longer willing or content to play nice. Your brother will have his preferred job classification."

He hoisted himself out of his position on the couch and gave his fellow soldiers a salute.

"And that's it for me. Have a good off-cycle, bots."

As the infiltrator sauntered through the doorway again, the swordmech turned back to the femme questioningly. "You haven't said what was so important you had to split in the middle of one of our training exercises. I get that you went to Vos to pay your respects, but that wasn't the way you were heading when you left."

"Your right, it wasn't." Rook frowned thoughtfully at her special student, thinking this new issue over.

Shadowdancer hadn't said what she wanted to tell the two of them about how the Covert Ops operated, or even if she wanted them told what she had gone to do outside of Simfur City. She now sighed, too tired to really muster up the worry she knew the problem rated. Her energy stores were dangerously low from the trip out to Simfur, then back to Praxus, then out and back to Vos.

"You really want to know? Once you do, you can never unask the question."

Sideswipe hesitated only long enough for Sunstreaker to make it up to the study after dismissing the class below. "Yes."

She looked between the two twins, identical to the last nut and bolt except for the paint, spark, and CPUs, and smirked faintly. It wasn't her normal one, the one she gave everything and anything that crossed her path. It was defiantly darker.

"I went to Simfur first. Well... just outside of Simfur. You see, the attack on Vos was engineered by this mech named Shockwave, who also had a hand in programming an indoctrination virus that infected our XO, most if not all the seeker frame set, and about half of what population Cybertron has left. Given this was the fifth time our dear Shadowdancer had come across this particular mech working to either capture or hinder our unit in some way, Shadow's patience with the mech snapped. She killed him, ripped his fragging helm off for the deactivation of a mech she owed her spark to. I was there both as a backup, in the unlikely event Shockwave was a bit too much for her, and to keep the guards and loyal fanatics of the mech off her door-wing joints."

The brother's reactions were as different as their personalities. Sideswipe's jaw plate dropped in shock over the information; Sunstreaker nodded in satisfaction and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest plates. "Good. Was wondering what you all would do about that. Nice to hear that fragger's gone."

The silver swordmech's left optic twitched, but he shook his helm to get it started again. "What do you mean the _fifth?_ I get the virus and Markmaker's incidents, but what else happened?"

"The first time was with Refit." Setting her pedes on her desk, Rook settled back in her chair farther as she calmly gazed at the two Autobots. "She had just landed the _ATHENS_ outside of Kalis, and there was a scouting group of Cons that were looking for a weapon or something for Shockwave who would have encountered Wheeljack, if he had not gone after the ship when he spotted it. Second was Perceptor, if Knightblade hadn't left Iacon when she did, the scientist would have been deactivated that off-cycle. Next was Nitro, the mech had hired bounty hunters to capture or kill a SPARTAN, he identified us by the symbols we all wear. Then the virus he had a hand in writing corrupted a bit of Shadowdancer's base moral coding, then Mark's death."

The saboteur shrugged, rolling her helm on her neck joint as she let her chair's front legs thump back onto the floor.

"Technically, she could have offlined the mech after he attacked her base coding since it is classified as a direct attack to be purposely infected with a virus, but we didn't know it was him at the time."

"The XO's coding?" Sunstreaker scowled a bit. "Was this before or after you all traveled to Iacon the second time?"

"Before. Her programming has been reset, so she's no longer as irritable." Before either could ask, she flatly stated, "Ratchet confirmed it."

It was the most she wanted to say about the incident, Shadowdancer still had not reconnected to the tactical uplink yet so the other SPARTANs were waiting for the CO to emulate her results before they started either worrying or fussing about the issue of what had happened to the XO after Markmaker's death.

Both of them accepted the name of the surly medic at it's face value. Ratchet was damn near legendary at this point.

"Well... both of you have some work to get to. Sides', let me know of what you're going to do before you go out, but for right now, I'm in some desperate need for recharge." She got up to her pedes to follow her brother's example. "We've got a few friends to visit next cycle, so you will aim for that window of opportunity so no bot can pin this to me. Me and Trick' will be in a medical upgrade wing for some of next cycle."

\V/

The four mechs, two femmes, and one youngling reached Gygax late in the cycle. For some reason, Shadowdancer had insisted Soundwave accompany them to her living unit, a place that he had never seen before or even considered visiting.

Zephyr landed on the roof of the building, unlocking the suite for the rest of them before any of the ground bound bots could get anywhere near the top floor where the Praxian lived with both her brothers and her youngling. The tired femme dismissed the helicopter for the cycle and next, remarking that they would reopen the bar next off-cycle before she could leave.

Giving a recharging Kynaite to Silentforce, she waited for the bodyguard to leave the room with her youngling before pinning the Decepticon mechs with a dark look. "I just hope you know what you're doing, Orph'. Cause it's on your helm if this doesn't go well."

Orpheus shrugged, trying to look unconcerned but unable to completely suppress the instinct reaction that had him taking a step back from the irritated femme.

Soundwave tensed as she turned her gold optics to him, but she didn't say anything for a good while, she simply inspected him first.

When the red and black mech reentered the room, she started speaking. "I know your suspicious of me, I would be in your place, and you're not a stupid mech. You've already gathered that I'm not just kicking around Gygax for the fun of it, right?"

"Assumption: Correct." He flicked some quick, leery glances to the two mechs standing in the way of the only escapes in the room, and concluded that whatever he was about to be informed of might just cost him his spark.

"Because I'm not. I, as well as my brothers here and the other siblings you've just saw in Vos, have been through two galaxy spanning wars. We've been taught how to wage war by a race that has explored every possible way to fight it; in wastelands, urban combat, in a council chamber, mountains, you name it we can fight in it; learned the history of several alien races and now we are here." Shadowdancer sighed tiredly, crossing her arms over her chest plates and leaning her hip joint against her couch's back. "I've nearly had my entire left arm assembly blown off in the process, as well as a number of other injuries that I don't care to repeat, fighting in those wars. When I got here, when we arrived outside of what was left of Kalis and got a good look around, I noticed something. While there might be a point in the conflict between the Autobots and your own Decepticons, there is an issue that I don't think the majority of the rest of your faction see. But I'm sure you know what I'm talking about already."

Soundwave blinked his visor, surprised. He tilted his helm at her, inspected her posture, the fact that it seemed like she was being brutally honest with him, and concluded that she was hinting at what he thought she was.

"Megatron is insane." She smirked when what little of his face plate that was visible showed no shock at the bald statement. "He may have had a point, a valid reason to start this in a time long past, but for the moment all he is doing is destroying the bots that Cybertron cannot easily spare without the All-Spark to replace them. He's killing and fracturing the cities, demolishing what refuses to bow to his cracked processors, and will eventually tear this planet apart. He called for change and yes, when the Golden Age ended it was needed, but this is a bit extreme. Don't you think so?"

She didn't even twitch, but the two mechs in the room with her tensed up, waiting for his response.

The 3IC of the Decepticons' spark raced at what he thought the femme was building up to, and nodded slowly to concede the point. He had concluded the same thing, but Megatron had a purpose. The mech was so feared that very few in the Decepticon ranks were willing to challenge the mech for control of the faction, regardless of how wild or contradicting his orders became.

With how chaotic and aggressive the rank and file soldiers in the faction had become, it was the only way to control the destruction that was inevitable with the demented mech in control.

He shot a quick look to both mechs, but addressed the femme. "Question: Purpose to explanation."

"I'm going to save the Decepticons from themselves." She grinned wryly when it was apparent she had gotten his full attention with that statement. "I'm sure you've noticed the rising violence and maybe you already know this, but Shockwave created a virus on Megatron's orders. This virus attacks a bot's moral coding, eroding it away until they don't care if they are killing sparklings or those that can't fight back, because it's the only way they can feel anything once the virus takes hold."

Soundwave stiffened at the news and glared at her. "Present: Evidence of claim."

Shadowdancer flicked a clawed hand, and held a data pad and a few data disks. She held one of the disks up and slotted it into the recess built for it. "I took this from Shockwave's laboratories when I ripped his helm off. Take a look for yourself. The second one is the anti-virus I had our hacker write up that stops it cold. There is another one, which slowly builds back up the moral code with about a twenty five percent modification from the original, but it's not being sent out until this upcoming megacycle with the next round of general anti-virus software boosters through the medics."

The communications officer hesitantly took the pad from her and started reading it with some sidelong glances to the other bots in the room. Halfway down, the file became more important to him than the possibility of being offlined.

He finished the first disk and slipped it out for the next, forcibly keeping himself from grinding his dental plates together in rage as he took an abbreviated look though it before uploading it to his own processors, and by his bond to them his cassettes. "Request: File of next anti-virus."

Nodding her agreement as she took back the pad, and smirking when she realized he had slipped out the disk with the anti-virus out and kept it, the Praxian subspaced her data pad again. "Megatron has been killing off those who don't have a strong moral code, by sending them to attack Autobot bases and getting them wiped out to the last. The fight we participated in near Iacon, it didn't have any real leader or purpose to it. It was just a fragged up fight to get rid of them without killing them himself, regardless of what he may have told anyone that asked though I doubt any bot did. The ones that do have strong coding, will end up twisted mockeries of what they once were. This has to stop before there are only thousands of Cybertronians left, or worse, only those left in the factions fighting each other until the end of the universe."

"Point: Agreed. Inquiry: Method?"

She sighed and sat down on her couch, gesturing for him to take a seat as she dismissed the two mechs for their berths.

"There are a few options I have, some of which you won't like." Waiting until he moved to the chair across from her, Shadowdancer tapped her claws together, watching the Decepticon sitting across from her carefully. "I could kill your entire faction, down to the last bot. I don't want to, you did have a point long ago, but I highly doubt you have anything that could stand up to a force of six bots trained and augmented to do just that. I could destroy those who had anything to do with this virus and go help the Autobots in wiping your faction out of existence, but again, I don't want to."

Soundwave tried to rise to his pedes in protest as she was talking about the bots he _worked_ with, and while he might spy on them and manipulate them, and some might have attacked her, they were still his faction and he would defend them from being wiped out entirely if need be. Even from a war built bot like her.

Operative word there being _tried_.

Before he could even raise himself an inch off his seat, or even release his suddenly frantic cassettes out of his chest compartment to help him she was sitting on his lap, knee joints on either side of his thigh plating, pinning him to the seat with an twin bladed energy blade held a fraction away from his throat cables and her other clawed hand buried into the padding of the chair back behind him. "Settle down, I just said I don't want to do that. Remember, there are mechs in your faction I genuinely like to talk to on occasion."

He blinked at her in complete shock, at her position so close to him that he could see the inner workings of her gold optics, then at where she had been sitting not even an astrosecond ago. He hadn't seen her move, much less any indication of the blade that emitted from her right wrist joint before this moment.

The sickening feeling that she may be telling the truth about what she could do to the entire Decepticon faction with minimal problems raised up in his spark, and his self-preservation programs froze him solid under her.

After a quiet moment, when the mech didn't try to move in any direction but didn't let go of the tension that would let him move at an astrosecond's notice, Shadowdancer deactivated her sword, but kept her new seat just in case. "Now, what I _am_ going to do is gather together those like you who will still be capable of being horrified and disgusted by this. I'm going to take all I can find, _save_ what I can, and amputate the rest. Some will be too far gone for the anti-viruses to help, so they will have to be deactivated before they destroy themselves and those around them."

She felt him relax beneath her, an odd sensation to say the least for the ex-human SPARTAN who had very little personal contact in her entire function. The mech lowered his helm minutely, and she could almost literally _see_ the cogs in his CPU turn over everything she had said.

"Inquiry: Command."

"That's my problem." Shadowdancer got up to her pedes cautiously, standing before the mech and setting her claws on her hip joints. "I don't want it. I _never_ want to deal with it again. So, I have to find a bot to take it for me. Some bot I can trust not to screw it all up by inevitably doing something stupid with it between now and when the part of the faction I try and save is stable enough to break away from the main ranks. I thought about Blackout, but he gets a little overcharged and all his secrets come spilling out. Bonecrusher is just too stubborn, and part of a gestalt unit so he can't keep quite even if he wanted to."

She raised on claw to rub against her temple.

"Barricade... I'm not all too sure about how stable he will remain, even with the anti-virus. And so far, that limits my list of possible bots to you, as I haven't met any other Decepticons I could trust even with my worst set of energon cubes."

"Suggestion: Vortex."

She raised an optic ridge at him. "Haven't met him yet, so bring him around sometime."

After a moment she shrugged, dismissing the mech from contention.

"I highly doubt there would be another candidate as well fitted as you for it. Shockwave, even if I hated the mech and he might have fallen into the same pit as Megatron, was another. But I just killed him, so..."

He nodded to acknowledge her point, perversely glad she had never approached the scientist about her suggestion. "Gestalt units: Bonded. Function: Impossible without fellow gestalts."

"I know, but I'll have to cross that bridge when I get to it." She took the four steps back to her previous seat, slumping down in exhaustion and not even cringing when her door-wings hit the back of the couch a bit too hard. "You do realize you'll be watched, now that you know what I'm doing, even if I don't settle on you to take this whole slag fest on, right?"

"Obvious: Acknowledged."

Shadowdancer snorted dryly, tapping her claws on the arm of her couch. "You've taken this better than I thought you would. I would have thought I would have to nick you once or twice to get you to listen."

"Inevitable Conclusion: Reached vorns ago." Soundwave shrugged himself, finally letting his cassettes out to stretch out their limbs from the compact forms they took to fit in his chest compartments. "News: Startling but not objectionable. Contradictory Statement: Obliteration of Deceptions not option."

"Of course it's not. Conflict is needed by all forms of life to exist." Shadowdancer idly watched as Frenzy started poking around the other doors in the hall that led off to the left, tiredly snickering when Orpheus threw something at the cassette to get him to shut his door again. "Function without it is rather boring and pointless. Just not this way."

She grinned wider when Frenzy enlisted Rumble and Ravage in helping him get back at the assassin for throwing what looked like a spare cushion at him.

"Have I mentioned I love having your cassettes around? But I wouldn't suggest you let them do that now, Orph' won't be nice at the moment."

"Suggestion: Agreed. Cassettes Frenzy, Rumble, Ravage: Desist." The Decepticon checked his energy levels, internally frowning at how low they had gotten from all the travel that cycle.

"You can stay here, there's an extra room at the very end across from mine. Orpheus said ' _Lord_ ' Megatron demanded our presence, so we'll be going to your base next cycle with you."

He considered her and her unexpected offer. The femme looked exhausted, not as bad as the mech designated Orpheus had been but she still had enough energy to effectively threaten him and make him listen before he could have done something that in hindsight had been foolish.

From what he had pieced together from the last few cycles; she had been out to Simfur to deal with Shockwave, out somewhere for a medical checkup, to Vos for the strange ritual for the deactivated SPARTAN, and then back to Gygax. He didn't know where she had been, but there was something slightly different about her now than before she had left.

She was more... considerate.

Before she had left, he would have expected her to kick him out after she was done, indifferent to any possible exhaustion of another. Shadowdancer was still violent, as evidence she had just held an energy blade to his throat cables, but it seemed tempered with more restraint than she displayed before.

Unsure of what to make of the change in personality, he nodded to her suggestion and led his cassettes down the only hall lined with doors. At the end there was an open door that he presumed led into the empty room, but he was wrong.

Kynaite was stretched out, deep in his recharge cycle on the berth, there was a few stacks of data pads on a desk next to an external comm device, and very little else that could belong to the femme who more than likely owned the room. The tools in their box on the floor were designed for a youngling's smaller hands, there was a thermal blanket hanging off the youngling's right pede and pooling on the floor, and a number of roughly crafted objects that seemed to have been built by the adoptive creation of the Praxian femme for some reason.

Backing out of the room, he hesitated when Frenzy slipped past him and went up to the berth without even a backwards look. The cassette grabbed the thermal blanket and hoisted himself up, covering both himself and the youngling with it.

"It's fine, leave them."

Shadowdancer had come up behind him, noted only by Ravage and Lazerbeak, smirking tiredly at the sight of the two tiny bots on her berth.

"I rarely get many joors of recharge anyways with the way Kynaite sprawls out. He loves to recharge on my door-wings and I can't recharge like that. The vibrations keep me up." She tilted her helm at the other door. "That's the empty one. Go on, I've got some work to do anyways and I highly doubt you have the energy reserves I do."

\V/

Sideswipe took one last look to ensure every bot was where he scheduled them to be at, before dropping down into the service tunnels of Praxis to rejoin his brother. "Almost set, Sunny. You ready?"

"Call me that one more fragging time and I'll put your helm though the wall, Sides'. I don't care if you are my brother or not." The unfortunately nicknamed 'Sunny' glared at his silver counterpart, cracking his knuckle joints loudly. "You sure about this?"

It was the closest Sunstreaker would get to outright saying anything against what Sideswipe had planned out for their Intel heist, and the swordmech wryly grinned over to his twin. "Are you that worried about me, brother dearest? Just think of this as a preemptive strike for all the worrying you're going to put me through when it's your turn to start learning from a SPARTAN."

Rook herself hadn't said much when the silver Autobot passed his plan past her, other than he 'needed to make sure all your ducks are in a row' first.

Sideswipe took it to mean double checking his work before starting.

The femme did give him a rather surprised look when he opted to leave his brother out of the plan, intending to go in himself and steal the information without any possible immediate backup. She did incline her helm to him before the twins left, giving him on last remark before they exited the dojo.

"Just make sure your exit strategy is set and sound, mech. That's what normally what trips us all up."

The fact that the femme referred to both himself, her, and supposedly Jazz, by saying 'us' instead of 'saboteurs' like she normally did gave the silver mech a good dose of confidence for his plan. Like everything else he had done while in Praxis, it all was building up to gaining a marked amount of respect from bots that had seen multiple brawls, fights, battlefields, wars, military operations, and combat situations.

Which, he supposed if you took out the bots themselves, was the coolest part of 'learning the ropes' from the SPARTANs.

If he hadn't already had some rough idea of what all the unit had seen before even getting to Cybertron, his work with Rook's past missions would have imbued him with a healthy amount of respect for the unit as a whole. The SPARTAN saboteur, who had been one of the class IIs and as such had seen about a stellar cycle more use as a military operative than the class IIIs, had been well traveled even by Cybertronian standards.

Sideswipe sometimes amused himself with trying to figure out who had more experience as a saboteur, Jazz or Rook. The Autobots' saboteur, the one the Prime himself picked for his unit, had more functioning time all together, but it didn't look like the SPARTAN had any down time between her missions. He had noted that the time stamps, once the femme herself had explained how humans kept time, were either bunched together or stated to start right after she got out of that Cryo 'stasis lock' of the humans.

Figuring that he had stalled enough, the silver twin checked over the equipment Rook had given him when he finally told her of what he wanted to do. "Almost time, brother mine. Wish me luck."

"Luck, for whatever its' worth, is less important than skill. Don't screw up."

\V/

Shadowdancer woke up to the resulting vibrations of two small bots recharging on her door-wings.

Sometime during the off-cycle, after she had given up trying to work on the data pads that held her normal orn to orn business work on them, she had put some of her Covert Ops skills to dubious use and crawled into her own berth around the two already there. Now she had Kynaite on her left door-wing, and Frenzy on her right.

It couldn't have been long since they moved, as she had told Soundwave the truth about not being able to recharge like that, but it did raise some issues about the process of getting up for the cycle.

Since going back to her recharge cycle was a lost cause, even if she was still feeling the effects of ignoring her energy levels in order to complete what she needed to do faster than any bot on Cybertron not a SPARTAN could, the tactician decided to spread the pain around. { _One-one-four, get your sorry aft in here._ }

The assassin responded an astrosecond later, walking into the XO's berth room with a fixed scowl on his face plate. { _What the frag do you want?_ }

{ _You can't tell by looking?_ } She raised a sardonic optic ridge at his obtuseness, and gestured to the two small bots lying out on top of her more sensitive appendages with one claw.

Orpheus blinked in surprise in the sleeping arrangement his superior officer found herself in and Silentforce, who had wandered in after the Covert Operations specialists simply to see what was up, snickered quietly to himself as he moved to help the pinned femme move one of the bots on her.

Moving Kynaite wasn't a problem, seeing how his normal schedule ended up, or rather started, by being handled while recharging a lot. Frenzy, on the other hand, bolted to his pedes the moment his systems registered that some bot had a hold of him.

All three SPARTAN-Bots peered down at him, and the cassette felt his systems heating up in embarrassment. "A-ar-re we-w ge-gettin up?"

"I am, you may return to your recharge if you need to." Shadowdancer swung upright, now freed from the pinning forms of both small mechs, and got up. "Keep your vocalizer setting low if you're staying up."

The small cassette hesitated, but all three of the larger bots left the room then, and giving up trying to keep himself online that early he crawled back up to the slight but warm depression the femme had left in the berth.

Shadowdancer hesitated outside the room Soundwave took last off-cycle but passed it with only a brief mention of who was in it to the bodyguard.

Silentforce watched the other two SPARTANs as they readied themselves to travel to the Decepticon base in a few breems, peering at the XO's back plates until she turned to him with a questioning optic ridge raised. "What?"

: _Why is Soundwave in the guest berth room?_ :

"He was as tired as the rest of us, and he's not built to take that kind of abuse like we are." The Praxian shrugged dismissively, sorting through the messages she had gotten while out of the city.

If she realized anything being off about her own actions, she was masterful at hiding it. The two SPARTAN mechs exchanged looks, but neither wanted to bring it up to her attention if she hadn't already noticed it.

Shadowdancer finally logged off the messaging program with a dry snort, tossing the data pad that she used to access it to the couch. "Fragging idiots. Remind me to deal with the high-grade distributors once we're back."

Nodding a confirmation to her back, the defensive specialist watched them leave to deal with the Decepticons. He cast a questioning glance at the door that held one such Decepticon behind it questioningly, then shrugged to himself.

If Shadowdancer was extending full curtsies to the mech, the least he could do was pull one or more of the cubes that the _ATHENS_ produced for that cycle's early refuel.

Soundwave exited the room nearly two full joors after the other two SPARTANs had left, his cassettes milling around his pedes. Silentforce listened intently, but the only thing the mech did before showing himself was collect Frenzy from the XO's own room.

The SPARTAN mech got up to his own pedes while casting aside the XO's data pad, he had been looking up the news nets for any hint of the SPARTANs mentioned, as it was around the time to stir Kynaite and get him ready for his Youth Center classes. : _Fuel is on the table._ :

The non-SPARTAN mech came to a halt, as it was the first time Silentforce had addressed him, peering first in the red and black mech's way before looking to the table in question. Silentforce ignored him entirely after that one transmission, reappearing with the SPARTAN femme's adoptive creation once the youngling had decided he wasn't going to be able to lie in the berth for a while until his carrier came back.

Soundwave had rummaged around for empty cubes, pouring out portions of the mid-grade for his cassettes before taking any for himself.

Kynaite didn't blink over the presence of the mech he normally only got to see every other orn sitting calm as could be in the seat his carrier normally occupied when nothing required her attention that early.

The youngling only took his normal seat, sharing with Frenzy, and beamed up to his silent uncle when the mech set his own cube before him. "Can-n I stay here, unca 'force? I don-n wanna go t-to school."

Blinking at the youngling, Silentforce shrugged to say he didn't really mind. Shadowdancer hadn't said anything to him about whether or not to continue with their normal cycle schedules while she was out trying to pull the wool over the optics of the Decepticons' High Commander.

From a defensive standpoint, staying somewhere he could easily defend was a good idea.

Kynaite clapped his hands together in a habit copied from Refit, then turned to the Decepticon sitting at the table with him. "Can-n Frenz-zy stay t-too?"

\V/

Trickflip's shin plates were attacked by a runaway blur of black and silver the moment he and the femme he called sister entered the medical facility's wing for upgrades.

"Trick'! You came to see me just like you promised!"

Silverbell leaned back to grin up at the infiltrator, wildly happy that the savior that saved her and her creators from the mockery of what had been made out of Kaon's fall was present for her final upgrade to an adult frame.

"Sure I did, Hell's Bells. Said I would, didn't I?" He waved to the two femmes standing with a medical bot; Flashfire waved back but Ruby was a bit distracted by what the medic was saying.

"And what am I? Chopped magnesium?" Rook mocked scowled down to the soon to be adult framed youngling, cracking a grin when the youngling squealed and glomped onto her leg plates in response.

As the three of them made their way over to the other two femmes and medical bot, they caught the tail end of what the medic was saying. "…only seen with military bots. I don't think that any youngling should jump right in and go for those kinds of upgrades. She should at least take a vorn or two exploring other options before getting caught up in all this discontent the Decepticons are spreading around."

Rook perked up at the subject matter. "What kind of upgrades?"

The medic scowled at the lot of them, but when Flashfire gestured for her to hand over the data pad with the features the youngling and her creator picked out, she did so with a huff. "I don't see what these two are doing here; they're not even part of your family unit."

Ruby rounded on the medic with a fierce scowl. "They are the ones that rescued us from Kaon, bot. Knock them again and your fellows will have to several orns putting you back together."

Trickflip, who had been peering over Rook's shoulder joint, raised his optic ridge at the unusually aggressive creator femme. { _That's a bit off from what I recall from her, one-two-seven._ }

{ _It was the bots from Vos that evacuated here. The virus the XO found has spread a bit, from the seekers to the ground bound of Vos, then to the other bots of Praxis once they arrived. And although I got the anti-virus from zero-seven-zero and started passing it on as discreetly as I could, Ruby got hit with the virus before I could give it to her._ } Rook whistled aloud at all the features the youngling had requested, only half of which the creators had signed off on, and peered down at the youngling herself. "All of this, Hell's Bells? What are you planning on doing?"

Silverbell turned shy suddenly, holding her hands behind her back and grinning covertly up to the femme. "It's a secret, Rook. I want them, though. Think you can change my creator's processors about getting them?"

The two SPARTANs exchanged a look, then parsed through the information displayed again. The more military type upgrades had all been signed off on, from targeting software to mid-grade armor upgrades, and the frame Silverbell would be getting was built for speed rather than the delicate control that normally marked most femme frame types.

The Chaser type frame was well detailed, as it was the frame most courier bots or delivery runners picked out, but there were a few upgrades that the youngling wanted that wouldn't go well with the frame type picked out, such as the speed boosting systems with her mid-grade armor.

To both military bots, nothing really looked out of place, other than the fact the youngling probably picked everything that she could and her creators had narrowed down the results. Trickflip took the pad from his sister and knelt down, starting to explain in terms Silverbell could understand why some of the things she picked out wouldn't go well with her soon to be frame.

Taking a good long look at the disgusted expression on the medic's face plate, Rook shook her helm. "So you want her to be at a deadly disadvantage if the Cons come here? It's just prudence, femme. Don't get your wires in a knot."

"Prudence? For all of that? She'll be the closest I've seen to a purpose built military bot!"

"Um… no, that would be me." Rook sardonically pointed to herself and raised an optic ridge at the medic's suddenly horrified look. "Since my… second upgrade, I think. Got any more questions you don't want answered?"

The medic femme nearly bolted from the room shortly after that, stuttering something about getting the operation room ready.

Trickflip paused in his explanation to Silverbell to give his sister in all but spark signature a wry look himself once the medic was gone. "Are you feeling alright, Rook? That was a bit mean, even for what we are."

The saboteur threw up her hands in some disgust of her own and stalked over to one of the uncomfortable chairs all medical facilities from here to the next galaxy had in surplus.

"I'm getting tired of hearing it. 'Oh, no. Protecting myself is the most horrible thing to think about!' Even back on Earth, some regions had two to three weapons per individual. Why is it such a slagging issue here?" She grimaced, and looked over to the family unit they were here to visit with. "Sorry for the language, Bells."

The youngling hesitantly looked up to her creators, but Ruby waved the apology away. "I'll let it slide, since she is almost old enough to start using it. But Rook, that's a holdover from when the Quintessions were manufacturing us for military purposes. The original Decepticons were nothing but walking pieces of weaponry and fortifications, and when the gladiatorial fights started up for that race's amusement it was one of the worst insults an Autobot, or a service drone for all intents and purposes, could be labeled as. It stuck with the Autobots, who later became the civilians of this age, when the Decepticons started the military units and left to colonize the moons and whatnot out of Cybertron's immediate view."

"Oh." Now Rook was frowning, wondering why Clearsight had never passed that information on the 'Quintessions' to the rest of the SPARTANs. "Well… that makes a bit more sense, but still. Times are changing, you need to change with them or be left in the rust of the past. And speaking of changes… sorry for being a bit irritable on this orn of all orns, Hell's Bells."

A little depressed over what the SPARTAN mech had explained to her, the youngling shrugged at the older femme. "It's okay, Rook. I'm just happy you both are here. I don't get to see you two very often anymore."

"And we're sorry about that too." Trickflip flicked the young femme's audio receptors fondly as he moved to join his sister where she had slumped into a chair. "But to keep you all as safe as Mark' and I did, in both Kaon and Vos, we're needed elsewhere."

Strangely enough, the littlest femme in the room at the moment perked up at that. "I know."

\V/

Orpheus led Shadowdancer straight to Lord Megatron, who was currently sitting in his throne, made up of other bots' parts that he had deactivated during his time as a gladiator.

The massive leader of the Decepticons raised an optic ridge at the SPARTANs now standing before him. "I got your present… Shadowdancer. I take it you didn't look through his memory files before you sent it on?"

The Praxian femme crossed her arms over her chest plates, leaning her weight on her right leg and giving the larger mech a level stare. "I didn't think there was anything I wanted to see in that bit of junk. Was I wrong?"

"No, simply checking." He leaned toward her, letting both hands hang between his knee joints as he inspected her from her chevrons to her pedes. "You don't look anything like I expected… but I suppose looks can be deceiving. What I want to know femme, is what the slag you think you're doing here."

Shadowdancer arched an optic ridge with a dry snort. "This is one of two cities I know of that won't be attacked by Decepticons. Why should you attack your own, after all? Tactically speaking, it's the safest place on Cybertron to raise a youngling, and that just so happens to be what I'm doing."

Megatron narrowed his optics on the femme, but he couldn't dispute what she was saying. Soundwave had already filled him in on the possible motives she might have. "Then why leave the city for his upgrade?"

"Haven't met a medic here yet that I would trust with my systems, much less Kynaite's." Shadowdancer shrugged off the question with a dismissive flap of her door-wings.

"Very well then. The only other problem I wanted to discuss with you is this." The Decepticon High Commander pulled off Shockwave's helm from the stack of them that made up the back of his throne. "There is a little issue with what you have done, Shadowdancer."

"Oh really?" None of the bots watching at that moment, other than the silver mech himself and Bonecrusher, who only had a very general feel of what the two of them could do, could tell that both SPARTANs tensed minutely at the large silver mech's claim.

Lord Megatron smirked wickedly, sensing some type of wariness coming from the two war built bots but misreading why it was there. "I seem to be down a Military Commander… for some odd reason his helm has been separated from his frame. That leaves the problem of who to promote to fill the spot. You're not a Decepticon… you're not even a supporter. Although I would have no objections to taking a bot of your caliber into the faction, I have no reason to trust you."

Shadowdancer's lip plates twisted into a dry smirk of her own, confusing the bots watching the confrontation. "I have no intentions on joining anything until Kynaite is upgraded for the last time… so that does leave us with a slight problem. May I make a suggestion, then?"

Leaning back in his throne, the massive ex-miner arched a questioning optic ridge at the femme standing before him calm as could be. Like he had said, she was nothing like he had expected.

She was composed when others of greater stature had shaken in their armor plates at the simplest sarcastic comment from him, hinted at mocking him when others would only stutter under his gaze, and nearly flat out refused any suggestion that she join his ranks when other bots have and did take him up on the off-hand suggestion and lorded it over their fellow Decepticons. The mech next to her, the other SPARTAN, didn't seemed at all surprised at how the femme was conducting herself, in fact he had an almost too sardonic to be called fond smirk on his own face plate.

"Suggest away, femme."

"Promote one of your gestalt teams to take the slot. Multiple bots means you could operate on a broader level than you can now, and the gestalt bond would let them correlate attacks much more efficiently."

The suggestion threw the Decepticon, who had been expecting a more self-serving answer from her. "Why not you?"

"I don't want command again. Did it once, and I'm never going back to it." Shadowdancer frowned briefly, casting a sidelong look to the mech standing with her before Lord Megatron, before continuing in an only slightly forced tone. "If you want to know about it, ask Orpheus later on."

The assassin blinked at her, surprised at the suggestion. "You sure about that, ma'am?"

"It's not like it's any great secret… well, anymore anyways. He might like to know why it was that I was so… brutal, in my response to this slight."

Any further conversation was stalled when Soundwave made it into the throne room, who silently assumed his spot behind Lord Megatron as he normally did.

Shadowdancer shrugged off any more conversation. "I have a youngling to corral if that is all you wanted from me, Lord Megatron."

"For now. I will be seeing you later, Shadowdancer."

She gave him the same salute the assassin did when he introduced himself, turned around sharply, and left.

Orpheus watched her go until she was out of sight, then turned back to the Decepticon High Commander. "Was that all you wanted from me as well? I need to return before I have to explain my absence to Governor Straxus. I wasn't all too sure about what you wanted me to say to him."

Megatron laced his finger joints before him, holding them before his mouth component, with his optics locked on the door the Praxian femme exited out of. "Say nothing to that so called Governor, but I have nothing further for you either, Orpheus. You're dismissed."

The assassin moonlighting as a shock trooper gave him a more familiar salute, with one hand over his chest plates right above the spark chamber, before leaving himself.

After the second SPARTAN left, the ex-miner turned to his third in command, who with Shockwave's deactivation was now his second. "What was it all about?"

"Purpose of disappearance: Paying respects to fallen member of unit." Soundwave responded with the same tone he used for everything, running the Praxian's plan for the Decepticons through his processors. "Number in SPARTAN-Bot unit: Sixteen functioning active units, one deactivated unit, three non-active units, one starship. Unit Shadowdancer's occupation before bartender: Tactical planning and Psychological warfare."

"Fascinating. Good work Soundwave. Keep an optic on her and whoever else socializes with her, and let me know when this waste of metal she cares for is upgraded to an adult frame." Megatron turned his attention back to the data pad he had been reading before the SPARTANs had entered the throne room, which held the casualty reports that he didn't care to read at any time. "I could use a bot like her."

The masked and visored mech inclined his helm to the Decepticon High Commander in acknowledgement of the order, sardonically thinking about what little use the SPARTAN femme had for the mech he was taking his orders from.

\V/

Rook blew out a sigh, bored beyond tears. The thought snagged her attention, and she wondered if Cybertronians could cry like humans could, or if it was impossible.

She figured it was something to at least ask either Knightblade or Refit the next time they all got around to talking at the same time, now that Optimus Prime wasn't requiring decacycle reports from them anymore.

Raising her helm, the saboteur looked around the waiting room at the other bots with her.

After she and Trickflip had entered the wing of the medical facility and Silverbell and Flashfire went off to have the upgrade done, there had been a few more family units that wandered in for whatever upgrades their own creations were receiving. Much to her amusement, the medics were giving her and Ruby a wide berth as they scurried around.

She had finished what little work she needed to do to run her getto dojo, prepped her next round of work so all she would have to do is turn in the business assessment to the Hall of Records in Praxus before paying her dues at the Government district for that vorn, and mentally planned out the next ten classes for each tier she taught.

About at the point where she was going to stop trying to amuse herself and start bothering Trickflip to do it for her, Flashfire finally came back to the waiting room followed a bit unsteadily by a black and silver femme.

Silverbell was still trying to adjust her stabilizers to the new height and length of her legs, and she nearly stumbled into the infiltrator in consequence of watching the floor instead of where she was going. "Sorry."

"No trouble, Hell's Bells." Trickflip carefully pushed her upright so she could stand on her own, and let go. "Can I ask what it is you intend to do now, or do you still not want to tell me?"

Rook cocked her helm as the sound of the young femme's fans kicking on, wondering at the cause of that reaction.

The femme herself beamed up the small distance that the SPARTAN mech stood above her now. "I'm going to join the Autobots."

"Really?" Blinking in surprise, the acid green and black mech chanced a quick look at the femme's creators, both of who looked resigned to their creation's decision. "Do you know what unit or classification you want to try for?"

Silverbell bounced on her heel stabilizers, checking the new way they moved on her. "Maybe, but I want to see what the recruiters tell me before I decide for myself for sure. After the whole two megacycles I have to get accustomed to my new frame."

With a wide grin, this was something else that was more interesting than her data work, Rook chimed in. "Well, we know of a few of them, so if you want to see how a normal cycle in a base goes, we can arrange it. Personally, I would tell you to try out for the Special Operations Division; you were sly enough in evading your creators when it was berth time."

Trickflip twisted around to glare at the saboteur cheerfully grinning at them all. "Mute it, Rook. There is nothing that said she has to become like us, she could try for weapons specialist or something like that if she wants to."

Blinking, the newly upgraded femme looked from one SPARTAN to another. "What unit are you two out of, anyways?"

"SPARTAN-Bot, Covert Ops Division." Rook bounced up to her pedes, now that the reason they had been waiting was standing before them. "It's not solely an Autobot unit, though."

All but shoving his sister out of the door before she attracted any more attention to them, Trickflip sighed resignedly. "There are more Autobots than Decepticons, we only have that one."

Both Flashfire and Ruby slowed a bit as the three of them got around to talking about military job classes and what was needed for all of them. The hot pink and silver femme sniffed a bit as Rook promised to help the femme learn how to fight before she actually enlisted. "My little femme is all upgraded now."

Patting her bonded on the shoulder plate, the red femme's lip plates quirked up a bit. "We can always try for another, now that Silverbell is fully upgraded and about to become a working soldier bot."

"I think we should wait, given how much unrest is about at the moment." Flashfire gave her silver and black creation a fond smile as the femme waved to her creators excitedly. "There were a few times I almost thought we wouldn't make it, and I don't want to go through that again."

(ooo000ooo)

When she got back to her dojo, Trickflip had been volunteered by Silverbell to take her out for high-grade now that her systems would take it, Sideswipe was sitting in her office with a wide grin on his faceplate even though his brother down stairs was still scowling.

The silver swordmech saluted the femme with a data pad he held, one that was painted green with red stripes. "Got it. All of it, even the slag he had hidden in an external drive behind a portrait of the Seven Primes."

"Well, well." Rook took the pad from the mech and looked it over. It was mostly speculation, but some of it would have done some damage if any bot had thought to try the Intel trader to see what they could see. "Not bad, Sides'. Right well, from here you need to report back to Iacon for Ratchet's tender mercies, then come back for a broad systems test before I sneak you both to Polyhex. But if Jackknife comes around questioning like I think he will, it'll mean you did what I told you to."

"Err… is Ratchet okay with installing it?"

"Refit might be the one to do it, but the medic mech said yeah to Warcry." The saboteur threw herself in her desk chair, tossing the data pad she had taken with her to the medical facility into her out box and rummaging around in her desk drawers for a magnet. "So, although he might be a bit grumpy, all of it should check out even without a generator like ours. You may find you need to refuel more often with the upgrades, but that should be it."

Finally finding the block of mineral stuck to the far back, she pried it loose and drew it over the green and red data pad.

"Where did you get this?"

"Innersight's desk, right side, three drawers down." The newly minted, SPARTAN trained Autobot saboteur raised an optic ridge at his mentor. "Are you going to return it?"

"It's called getting rid of the evidence that could pin you to the crime, mech."

\V/

No bot was particularly surprised when Soundwave entered the bar a full joor before he normally did for his and Shadowdancer's off-cycle game. Zephyr, still clueless about what the Decepticon mech was in on, led him up to the second level of the refurbished warehouse turned bar anyways.

Shadowdancer raised an optic ridge at them both, but refrained from commenting until the helicopter left to check in on Kynaite and Frenzy. "Is this a social visit or simply business?"

"Lord Megatron: Content with information provided. Intent: Methodology for virus infected."

"I said amputation last cycle, right? I meant it." Placing the data pad down on the desk, the SPARTAN-Bots' XO leveled a stern look at the mech across from her. "What is it you're really asking, Soundwave?"

The blue mech spent a breem phrasing what he wanted to say. "Possible option: Reformat."

"That's not something we can do at the moment without attracting attention to ourselves." Lacing her claws together, the femme considered the suggestion from every possible angle her battle computer could predict. "Later on, it might be something to look into, but how would you suggest we hide who we reformat right now?"

"Inquiry: Target?"

"Orpheus has found the main carrier of the virus in Polyhex. Ratbat apparently let Shockwave reprogram a few things in his CPU, and the scientist slipped in a few nasty things." Shadowdancer raised a questioning optic ridge again when Soundwave appeared to stiffen at the name. "Do you know him?"

"Unit Ratbat: Once Polyhex Senator." When the femme did nothing but stare at him, the Decepticon sighed through his vents. "Acquaintance made: Approximately twenty seven vorns ago. This unit: Scientific aid, attached to Polyhex governing council."

"I take it that it wasn't a pleasant acquaintance then?" As the mech was so stiff it rivaled how bad he had gotten last off-cycle, the femme had to assume her guess was correct. "If you want, you can try your reformatting option on him so we can see how it works out, I just don't see how you're going to hide it."

"Intent: Hide in plain sight."

\V/

Warcry knew he couldn't stall for any longer, his work was done and so was most of the Prime's, so he finally wandered over near the end of the working joors to the medical bay where both Refit and Ratchet were waiting a bit impatiently for him to show up. Knightblade had to be called up from where she had wandered off to with her two Crystal City mechs, as they were playing with some of the demolitions stored in the Autobot base, and once the sniper turned scientist's assistant showed herself with Perceptor in tow they got to work.

Stretched out on one of the medical repair berths, the tank had a good view of both the former AI and the Head Medic of Iacon as they went over the steps of a medical initiated reboot again. For something that had once been human, listening to what the two of them were discussing was a bit disturbing.

Knightblade finished what she was doing at the back of his helm with the same device she had used on the XO and took it over to where the other scientist was standing as Refit finally bounced over to the CO's side. "Are you ready, sir?"

"Not really, but you can start anyways."

With a slight grin for the tank's seemingly permanent wary expression, the medic in training rounded the repair berth to where the opening in his helm was. Her digits were warm as she carefully picked through his processors to ensure nothing had been disturbed before she closed up the panel and reached for the SPARTAN's emergency stasis lock switch, using the tiny tool all medics apparently had in their hands to activate it.

Refit grinned a bit wryly as the tank went still. "That's going to be one of the more difficult problems to do to the others if this works."

"The slagging lock? Why?" Ratchet stopped in handing her the medical monitor they were going to attach to the SPARTAN-Bots' Commander to see what it was that would go on during the reboot.

"Some of them know how to get around it. They didn't like the idea that some medic could put them offline if they didn't want to be."

A sudden cough of some bot's systems made both medics turn to the suddenly sheepish looking sniper. She peered back at them warily. "You weren't supposed to tell him that, 'fit."

Refit shot her a wicked looking grin before taking the monitor and attaching it. "Who all can do it? I know you can by your reaction, and most of the Covert Ops Division as well."

"Clearsight, Nitro, the SPARTAN you happen to be working on, and Spotter… and in essence the rest of his trine might be able to as well but I've never asked." Knightblade tapped her finger joints against the data pad that held the copy of the tank's current processing programs. "I think Shadow' told the others of her Division not to inform Orpheus of how it was done."

Perceptor narrowed his optics on the femme next to him, who grew a bit guiltier looking under his stern stare.

"It was a bit before we got to Iacon the first time, we didn't really know what the medics would do with us."

Refit giggled as Ratchet huffed irritably at the sniper, who quickly ducked her helm and turned her attention to the pad before her. "Shall we start?"

(ooo000ooo)

The first thing Warcry noticed when his systems booted up was that he was running less programs that he had before. Then he noted that the programs he was running were much more complex.

The tank cautiously onlined an optic, taking in his immediate view of the AI turned Cybertronian medic peering down at him with a measure of concern. "What is it 'fit?"

"How do you feel?"

"Fine." The tank cautiously raised himself to a sitting position, testing the new responses he was getting from his own systems. "It's a little disquieting, but Shadow' was right, 'fit. A simple reboot should work."

Using one heavy hand to loosen up the stiffened cables in his neck column, looking around.

It seemed that a few joors had passed, not surprising as the medics intended to take it slower than the XO's crash to record everything that happened while his CPU rebooted.

Knightblade was nowhere to be seen, and neither was the scientist shaped shadow she seemed to have acquired recently. Ratchet was dealing with some bot that had wandered in with an energon leak on the other side of the med bay, but other than that, the room was mostly deserted.

"Knight' is in the office with Spotter. They want to see you once you're on your pedes again."

As Refit flitted around him, checking over what she needed to before formally discharging him from the med bay, he ran through a manual systems check. Nothing responded as it used to, the female human voice that had delivered news of his systems for the last vorn since he woke like this had been replaced by a simple feeling that everything was checking out as it should. Warcry supposed it was how normal Cybertronians felt, as opposed to the formal way the SPARTANs were used to with their MJOLINER systems from being human.

Once the ex-AI released him to his own devices, he wandered over to see what it was that the scientist and the hacker wanted from him. Knightblade and Spotter had a copy of some program up on a vid screen, borrowed from Xenon who was watching the goings on instead of dealing with his work. "What is it?"

The sniper started a bit, whirling around to take in the view of the tank on his pedes standing in the doorway. "Sorry sir, but 'fit didn't say when you were getting up."

"It's a delaying program, we think." As the one to answer the SPARTAN-Bots' CO, the silver seeker pointed out some line of incomprehensible techno babble to the other SPARTAN. "Or something similar to a timer, really. Its function was to initiate a reboot on its own, and we are thinking that's what happened to the XO."

"Except that she crashed before it could, setting it all in motion herself instead of having this do it for her." The blue gray femme turned back to the screen with a thoughtful frown. "We've checked through our own CPUs and found comparable programs, all set to happen at different times. This one is mine, and it's got about half a decacycle left on it."

"Why didn't either of you find this before?" Still trying to work out a stubborn kink in his neck cables, the tank took a closer look at the sniper's programming.

"We weren't looking for anything like this, just viruses and incompatible or glitched programming, and it happens to be something that didn't glitch up once or twice." Spotter brought up one clawed digit and started gnawing on it. "Taking a complete look through the programs we onlined with, and as I'm sure you've noticed most of yours are gone just like Shadowdancer's, would have taken just as long as waiting and seeing what was going to happen. Right now, though, we just need to give the rest of us a reboot, and I'll spend the next half a vorn paging through it for any more surprises, one by one."

Warcry sighed as he started to wonder how long it took the hacker to do an in-depth look at one of their CPUs. "Suppose we should also get on the other problems and issues that we've been ignoring."

"Like Knight's spark chamber?"

The sniper in question spared the newly arrived inventor with a half-sparked glare even as the tank nodded to the same mech. "We already know we _have_ sparks, Shadowdancer wouldn't have been able to bond with her youngling if she didn't. The only question is, are they comparable to a Cybertronians' spark or something else entirely?"

Knightblade gritted her dental plates, but gave a grudging nod to the SPARTAN-Bots' CO's stern look. "Under the maximum containment we can devise. I won't risk you, 'jack, or Percy if our spark chambers are not designed to be opened up. I'm not budging on that issue either."

Wheeljack flashed the femme a bright pulse of blue light. "That's fine, Knight'. Caution is probably for the best anyways."

Blinking, the scientist's assistant peered at the inventor, looking for flaws. "Who are you, and what did you do to 'jack?"

"Oh, ha ha ha." The blue shifted to a more teal color, and the inventor rolled his optics at the femme's crack at his normal methods of research. "Like I haven't heard that one from you yet. I know how to be careful… most times."


	26. Chapter 26

Titan sighed heavily as he sat outside of his last Youth Sector complex.

Giving the younglings and their creators' information about the Enforcers and what they do hadn't been so bad. The questions that they came up with afterward were the doozies he had to watch out for, since most of it involved the situations of Kaon and Vos and what had happened in each city.

On top of that, getting Warcry to get him some emergency leave to attend Markmaker's fare thee well had taken a bit of doing. His Station Chief had been less than amused to be forced to find some bot to cover a cycle's worth of his duties, and he now owed a few bots some favors in addition to being unable to take leave again for a good while.

Looking out at the younglings playing in the attached park while their creators stood around and gossiped, the white and black SPARTAN's optics were caught by a youngling doing the same thing he was.

Titan arched a questioning optic ridge at the young mech, taking in his striped with black yellow paint and rather impressive pout. The youngling wasn't very aware of his surroundings or what was going on behind him, because it took him a good breem to realize the Enforcer was staring at him.

Stiffening, the young mech scowled up at the SPARTAN petulantly. "What?"

"What's up with you?" Titan moved down a few steps to sit next to the yellow and black mechling. "Why aren't you playing with the others?"

"Don't wanna." Kicking his small pede, the youngling trained his scowl on the other younglings playing. "Sides, they don't wanna play with me."

"Ah." Since he didn't really have any sort of younglinghood himself, Titan had no idea what to tell the young mech next to him.

The two of them spent some time bot watching, the SPARTAN SWAT Enforcer pointing out a few odd frame additions to make the young mech next to him snicker to himself. Until he pointed out the reflective, sparkly black paint job one of the Government workers here with his own youngling.

"Mister Inkblot said there is a whole unit of Autobots that are protecting civilians in different cities. He said you were one of them." The young mech, who after a breem of being amused by the Enforcer had introduced himself as Bumblebee, stated in a matter of fact tone. "Is it true?"

Titan let his helm fall into his left hand. "Perfect."

With another heavy sigh, civilians and their storytelling were going to get him in trouble at this rate, the SPARTAN turned to his new little friend.

"Where is this… uh, Mister Inkblot from?"

Bumblebee grinned up at the white and black mech. "It is true, isn't it? Mister Inkblot was one of Sentinel Prime's aids, and he said he was in Kaon when the old Prime deactivated and he saw a few of that Autobot unit as well as the new Prime. He said they all had the same gold and silver symbol you have."

The youngling scrambled to his pedes, certain in his own slightly underdeveloped processors that the Enforcer mech was one of them, and bounced before Titan.

"What are you called? Is what you do top secret? Can I come with you?"

"Err… hold up there a moment." Raising one white hand to halt the youngling's run away mouth components, Titan desperately tried to figure out how to deal with this situation. He really didn't want to ask the others how to handle a youngling's questioning, as that would be a little embarrassing to explain. "I'm Titan, remember? I told you all not a few joors ago."

"Yeah right. If you are part of a top secret Autobot unit mingling with civilians and Decepticons, you wouldn't use your real designation." Bumblebee was still bouncing on his heel stabilizers and wearing a wicked grin as he grilled the SPARTAN for all his little frame was worth. "Can you tell me? Will you have to kill me if you do? This is so cool."

The SWAT Enforcer blinked bemusedly as the youngling went off on a tangent about all he had heard about top secret military units and how they operated, most of which were completely made up. Catching sight of one of the Youth Sector workers walking over in their direction, Titan panicked and set both his hands on the youngling's shoulder joints to hold him still.

"Bumblebee, listen to me closely. Yes, I'm part of that top secret unit, but you can't tell any bot that I am." Before the youngling could protest, the SPARTAN barreled on, desperately hoping this gamble of his was going to work. "It wouldn't be secret if every bot and their creator knew about it, now would it? I can tell you some of what we do, but only if you promise me you won't tell anyone."

"Oh." Bumblebee blinked a few times, then his grin, if it was even possible, got a tiny bit more wicked in nature. "Okay, as long as you do something for me."

Titan hung his helm, rubbing the back of it with his right hand as he let the youngling go. "If I can, little mech. What do you want?"

"I wanna meet a seeker."

Slowly raising his helm, the SPARTAN grinned at the youngling. "That I can do. Give me a few megacycles to sneak him out here, and I'm sure Tigerstripe won't mind meeting you."

The Youth Sector worker that Titan had spotted chose that moment to walk up to the two of them. "Is everything going okay, Enforcer? Bumblebee isn't bothering you, is he?"

"Nope. Can I keep him with me for a few? He's asked some questions he was too shy to ask in front of a crowd." Titan smirked up at the femme, winking for emphasis when she timidly smiled back.

"Sure, just sign him out on the servers and return him to the office when you're done answering questions, sir."

The femme walked away with a small smile to the white and black mech, missing the moment when Bumblebee grimaced in disgust at her back. "Adult framed bots are weird."

The SPARTAN shrugged at the youngling's aversion to his flirting. "I can safely say so are younglings."

"Hey!"

\V/

After sending off the two Autobot twins, Rook bid Trickflip and Silverbell, who was still talking to the infiltrator about military occupation specialties, a fond good off-cycle and left her dojo to meet up with her Praxus mechs in their now customary bar.

About half a joor into listening to Bluestreak ramble on about differently carved energon cubes and what was more popular for cafes and bars like the one they were sitting in, the SPARTANs' saboteur's optics caught on a flash of gold near the entrance to the bar.

Raising an optic ridge, she reduced the amount of processing power she had concentrated on the Praxian merchant and let her optics wander over the other bar hoppers in the establishment.

She caught sight of Jackknife again the same moment that Smokescreen caught on to her distraction. "Problem, Rook?"

"I've gotta go talk to some bot real quick. Tell me about those gear carved cubes after I get back, Blue." The gray femme slipped off her barstool before any of the bots sitting with her could say anything and melted into the crowd.

Blaster blinked at the spot he lost sight of her. "Damn, wish I could move like that. Wonder what lit a fire under her pistons."

Smokescreen suddenly scowled, rising off his own barstool and slipping off in the direction the femme had left. Bluestreak watched his brother go with confusion, and then turned to the communications expert when he lost sight of the other Praxian. "What just happened?"

"Good question. Eject?" The cassette who had been sharing a stool with Rewind leapt off his own seat and dashed after the two missing members of their little group. "Let's find out."

(ooo000ooo)

Rook slipped out of the bar, deftly evading the pooled lights in the streets from both the off-cycle opened businesses and street lights, following the underground enforcer to where it was he wanted to talk.

A misplaced sound of some bot's pede catching on the lip of a metal that made up the walkway on either side of the street told her that some bot was following them, or her, either or…

With a bit more caution, she came to a stop a few feet away from the obviously disturbed mech that had lured her out here. "Something up, 'knife?"

"What the slag did you do? My boss has been all over my aft cause he thinks you _just_ broke into his office!"

"Um… I was at a medical facility all cycle, mech. You're going to have to be a bit more specific, I've done a lot of breaking into places I shouldn't have in my function."

Engine growling, the red and gold painted mech threw up his hands in exasperation. "If it wasn't you, who could have done it? All the info we got on you suddenly disappears and you have an air tight alibi! What the frag is going on?"

Rook leaned her weight to her left leg assembly, crossing her arms and pinning the fritzing mech before with a bored look. "I'm no expert, but isn't there a lot of rivalry between underground crime lords? Maybe one of them did it."

"That can't happen. Cryotek wouldn't let it."

"Who?"

"Cryotek, he's-" Jackknife snapped his mouth components shut and stared at the SPARTAN hard. "Why don't you know who he is?"

"He hasn't gotten in my way yet." Rook shrugged dismissively, scrutinizing the now gaping expression on the underground enforcer's face plate. "What?"

"HE… you… you're slagging insane, femme." Jackknife gripped the back of his helm hard, hysterically wondering how much worse that cycle could get. "Cryoteck is like… the overlord of the crime lords. He's the one giving orders we all march to, and when he figures out that we no longer have anything on you… he just may come for you himself."

The SPARTAN femme arched an optic ridge at the nearly panicking mech thoughtfully. She had thought the underground was unusually ordered on her arrival, but had chalked it up to simply Cybertronians being more ordered that humans could ever be.

Now with this puppet master behind everything, she wondered where in this mess Prowl had ended up before becoming an Autobot. "Okay… and?"

Jackknife was damn near whimpering under his intakes at this point. " _And!_ And you need to be careful! I don't know what's going to happen now!"

Rook blinked at the mess of a mech before her. "I never asked you to watch out for me, 'knife. If it gets bad, just pretend ignorance. I'm a big femme; I can take care of myself and whatever is thrown my way."

The red and gold mech blinked at her in a stupor, wondering what programs she was running and why it was he couldn't see it the same way she could. Finally shaking his helm, the mech blew out a sigh as he tried to gather his scattered processors. "If… if you're sure, Rook. Just… watch your back plates for a while, please."

"That I can do. My brother's in the city, and I'm sure he won't mind sticking around a cycle or ten." The SPARTAN saboteur was already running her security measures through her processors, and figured that upgrading them a bit wouldn't hurt anything either. "If that's all you got for me, mech, I've got to get back."

"Yeah… just, sure." Emotionally maxed out, the mech wandered away, intent on getting back to his boss before the mech threw another fit about whatever happened.

Rook held still despite her claim. There was that one watcher to deal with before she went back to the bar herself, just in case the bot was watching Jackknife for any less than completely loyal actions to his Thief Lord. After a few moments, she slipped into the shadows and doubled back to where she heard the noise of some bot's pede catching on metal.

She barely kept herself from cursing aloud when she saw that Smokescreen had followed her out of the bar. Ruefully figuring that playing all those Covert Ops games with the Enforcers and the merchant had been, in hindsight, a bad idea, she snuck up on the Enforcer using all of her less than honest skills. "Having fun, Smokey?"

Smokescreen bolted upright and whirled on the femme, stopping short at the less than amused look of her face plate. "Err… Rook, ah… no, it's a little cold out here to be sneaky."

Instead of taking the opening and harassing him about it, the SPARTAN femme frowned at the Enforcer. "What did you hear?"

"Erm… nothing really. Just that the mech seemed really worried." The Praxian hedged around the question, calling on all of his Enforcer training and programming to do so. "Rook, are you in some kind of trouble?"

Still frowning, the gray femme looked to where Jackknife had wandered out of the street at. "I've always been in trouble, Smokey. This doesn't look to be too different from anything else I've ever done."

"…you'd tell me if you were in over your helm, right?"

Rook finally smiled wryly at him. "If I can't deal with it, what do you think you could do about it? Come on; let's go back before your brother has a conniption fit."

(ooo000ooo)

Eject ran back like some bot was trying to kill him. He bolted to the stool he had left and scrambled up it, nearly knocking Rewind off.

Before either the merchant or communications expert could ask him anything, Rook strolled back to the bar with Smokescreen in tow. "What's up with him, Blast'?'

"I… have no clue. Might be time for a checkup with the medics. Where did you two get to?"

The SPARTAN femme shrugged and changed the subject. "Saw a bot I knew and went to go say hi. Now, where were we, Blue?"

\V/

"-slagging unusual for them, Prime. Something has to be happening for the Decepticons to go after two cities in the space of a vorn. There wasn't a fragging reason for it given this time." Ether scowled irritably at the displayed information detailing the attack on Vos.

Optimus frowned behind his battle mask himself, wondering what to tell the other Autobot officers about the incident.

Ether was raising a concern that the others had been thinking themselves, but was the first to speak up about it in the officer's meeting.

Ultra Magnus, who was staying on as Optimus' Military Commander, Ironhide, Elita One, Ether, Jazz, Xenon, Ratchet, Zeta, Prowl, Stonewall, Kup, and Red Alert, who was going to be officially taking Kup's place as the Security Director of Iacon's base in a few short decacycles, were all crammed into one of the conference rooms beneath Iacon for the meeting.

Since neither Kup nor Red Alert knew anything about the SPARTANs, the Prime couldn't simply state that Shockwave, who had been behind the attack, had intended on capturing one of the ex-alien soldiers to study and that was why most of the City of Seekers was crumbling down to rest at the foot of the cliffs it once stood on. He also hadn't thought of sending out some kind of memo to the others the moment he knew, leaving him without any way to answers the bots who knew enough without letting on to the SPARTANs' less than normal history to the two who didn't know.

Kup drew attention to himself when he shrugged at the Head of Covert Operations. "Slag happens, mech, especially in war. You'd think you would be used to it by now. It's either an intimidation tactic or a warning. Didn't you mention before, Prime, that the Decepticons were pushing some other seeker to be the Air Commander?"

Optimus grabbed hold of the subject change with both hands. "Yes, one of the seekers from Sentinel's old seeker guards. Starscream."

Before Ether could dryly remark that there had been no seekers in the Decepticon forces sent to attack Vos, Warcry finally made it to the room. The tank ignored the attention his lateness to the meeting earned him, and tossed a data pad to the Prime. "I think you may want to take a look at that."

Optimus flipped it over and read the file presented as Warcry took a seat next to the other Unit Commander. The ex-Guild Master gave his fellow officer a wry grin. "Almost thought you were going to skip the meeting, War'."

"Perish the thought." The tank rolled his optics, rubbing the base of his helm with one massive hand as he got comfortable. "Just came from the medics, it's why I'm late."

Even the two mechs that didn't know anything was off about the SPARTANs' history perked up at that.

Zeta leaned forward to get a good view of the SPARTAN mech. "Is everything alright?"

"Apparently we were due for a more thorough checkup than we thought." Warcry grinned at the older femme as he figured out how to pass on more information without stating it aloud. "Made my XO crash, but she's just been in and out of the medics' hands not too long ago. Refit's picking apart how she wants to deal with it at the moment."

"Warcry-"

"It's fine, Prime. Sixty four vorns since the last time we had a maintenance check, remember? There were just a few processing errors that needed to be dealt with that we ignored."

Optimus hesitated, but took the explanation at face value for the moment. It wasn't really anytime to get in-depth with the SPARTANs and their maintenance habits. "If you insist."

"What do you think of Vos then, Warcry?" Ether was still scowling, and he pinned his irritable expression on the newly arrived tank.

"From what little Drax was telling me, the Decepticons were after something highly confidential in the Aero Space Division. They didn't get it, since it blew up when the city did, so the only thing the Cons got from Vos was an aft kicking."

The Head of Covert Operations was going to ask something else, but Jazz discreetly elbowed his superior in the side plating. Prowl twitched at the action, having caught what the silver saboteur was going to do before he did it, but refrained from taking his friend to task for assaulting an officer while attending a meeting given that he couldn't argue with the results.

Ether had snapped his jaw plates shut at the contact, ran his processors over the tank's words again, and realized what Warcry was saying without saying anything. "Blew up, you say?"

The rest of the meeting passed without Vos being brought up again, but the bots who knew something about the SPARTANs made mental notes to ask the tank what that meant afterwards. Ultra Magnus, who was one of three bots who knew where each SPARTAN was at any given time, winced as he realized that meant the other tank, the SPARTAN-Bots' 2IC, was no longer among the functioning.

Kup took in what the tank had said as the officers broke up for the cycle, wondering what it was he was hinting at. There were a few things that were not adding up to the old vet, something he was having trouble finding alarming because the Prime himself seemed to know what it was and was alright with whatever it was.

(ooo000ooo)

Warcry repeated himself five times on what had actually happened in Vos to several of the other Autobot officers when they made a point to swing by his office and ask for a clarification of what he had hinted at during the officer's meeting. Less than a breem had passed after Zeta and Prowl had invaded his work space before the mech he was waiting on darkened his doorway. "Kup, need something?"

"It's not something I need, mech, more like something I would like." The Security Director for Iacon's Autobot base leaned against the tank's doorframe, arms crossed over his chassis and frowning thoughtfully at the mech seated behind the desk. "You see, there is something confusing about you. You lead a unit that seems well established despite any glitches your soldiers have; you have an XO that I've never heard of; you have gaps in your history that is remarked upon by most if not all of our fellow officers; and yet the Prime trusts you at your word and sends you off on a personnel scouting mission with me. There are a lot of things that are not adding up about you, Warcry."

The CO of the SPARTAN-Bots ignored the pile of data pads he had been pretending to work out of and gave a small smile to the mech.

"Ask Optimus, and tell him I said it was alright." When the only thing Kup did was arch an optic ridge at him questioningly, Warcry's smile turned into a smirk. "You can drag Red Alert along. He might need the helms up before the others come back."

Kup finally left then, passing a green and gray mech on his way out.

Galeforce watched the battered looking mech walk down the hall for a moment before turning to his superior officer. "Sir, Serria-zero-three-nine reporting as ordered."

"You already know the scoop, Gale'." Warcry hefted himself out of his chair and rounded his desk. "With Markmaker's deactivation, you're our new Second in Command. Report to the medical bay first. There is a small issue we need taken care of. Refit will brief you on it. Oh, and tell Ratchet we might blow Red Alert's processors in a few."

The combat engineer nodded sharply and left down the left hand hallway, still intensely disliking his new rank in the unit. The SPARTAN-Bots' CO made his way down the right hand hallway, intent on letting Optimus know what was about to storm his office.

\V/

"That sounds boring."

Titan grimaced at the youngling's expectations for him. "Well, not everything can be as glamorous as entertainment vids, 'bee. For right now, that's what I'm doing."

They were sitting right on the steps of the Youth Sector Bumblebee went to, as Titan had no idea how long he could keep the youngling out for. They had gone to get energon goodies to begin with, more for the youngling than for the SPARTAN as they upset the SWAT Enforcer's tanks when he had too many, and wandered around the city for a bit as Titan carefully gave the young mech bits and pieces of the SPARTANs' duties while out among the civilians and some of the 'official' explanation of where they had been before they showed up in recent vorns.

Bumblebee was now kicking his pedes against the step he was sitting on, as he was a bit too short to set his pedes on the next step down or even on a step a few down like the SPARTAN could. "So… when can I meet a seeker?"

"Tigerstripe said okay, so as soon as he can swing some leave from his trine leader to make it out here." Leaning his weight back on his braced arms, Titan carefully inspected the youngling he was sitting with. "'bee, where are your creators?"

Bumblebee fidgeted under the Enforcer's steady gaze. "They're not… functioning anymore. So I live here."

"Ah… well… sla-err, dang." The white and black SPARTAN rubbed the back of his helm. "I didn't either, you know. Spent the first few memory files I can recall in a Youth Sector like this one."

"Really? Are you from Tyger Pax originally?"

Titan winced at the youngling's continued probing into his past. While his little confession had gotten Bumblebee to stop thinking about his creators, the young mech was still asking questions about him. "Erm… I don't think so, 'bee. But it was so long ago that I've forgotten where it was I'm from."

While the SWAT Enforcer was sure either Refit or the _ATHENS_ , as creepy as it was to think about, had a list somewhere of which SPARTAN was from what planet, he really didn't care enough to look it up for himself, seeing as it was likely that his home planet was probably a floating ball of rock and glass now.

"Must be nice, being old enough to forget things." The youngling set his elbow joints on his thigh plates and placed his helm on top of them, glumly looking out at the city. "Wish I was that old."

Titan was about to ask why, when a half recalled session of his Enforcer training reminded him that orphans were upgraded on their city's credit and as such owed that much to the city. They were expected to work it off doing whatever tasks the city that upgraded them were short bots for before being able to do what they wanted. Bumblebee probably wasn't looking forward to it, as he may just end up as a courier bot for some shipping firm for the first few vorns of his adult function.

"Uh… 'bee, we've been helping out younglings… and sparklings now that I think of it, when we come across them. If you want, I could pay your upgrade fee when it's time for yours." Since his optics was on the cityscape as well, his peripherals caught the youngling snapping his helm over to him. "I've done the whole 'indebted to the government' thing before, and I'll spare you from it if I can."

"Really?" Bumblebee looked hopeful for all of an astrosecond, before something else occurred to him. "I've got medical fees too, from the accident that deactivated my creators. The credits my creators saved up didn't cover it all."

Titan grinned wryly at the youngling. "I'm not doing anything with the credits I earn; I live in the barracks after all. I'm pretty sure I have enough to cover what you've racked up so far. And even if I don't, the others will."

(ooo000ooo)

Titan went back to the Youth Sector the next orn before his scheduled patrols started, to see about paying off Bumblebee's medical fees. The youngling himself had been waiting for the SPARTAN near the offices, and he joined the Enforcer as Titan flirted the information out of the femmes that worked there.

Rolling his optics in disgust at the adult framed bots and the things they got up to, Bumblebee followed the white and black mech into a small room normally used for prospective creators adopting younglings. He watched the mech work on the data pad, filling out his banking information and how much he was willing to pay, so he saw the brief frown that crossed the SPARTAN's face plate. "What is it? Too much?"

"Naw, I can pay the medical all off, but we're going to have to talk to my sister about your upgrade fees." Titan added his digital signature to the bottom of the pad and turned it off before the youngling could see how much it was. "That's… not going to be fun."

"Why not?" Undaunted when the older mech didn't answer him right away, the yellow and black mechling followed the Enforcer as the mech turned in the pad to the office and signed him out of the Youth Sector again. When the two of them hit the streets, he tried his question again.

Titan rolled his optics at the youngling, earning him a huff that made him chuckle. "Shadow's… a little scary. Tough femme, though she doesn't really look it."

Nearly running to keep up with the Enforcer, Bumblebee skipped a bit to get the mech's attention to the speed he was walking. "Is she your boss?"

Slowing down for the youngling's shorter legs, the SPARTAN shook his helm negatively. "Nope, she bosses around the Covert Ops Division. But she is all but my boss' left servo though."

Titan stopped in front of an external comm center, paying the fee for getting both him and Bumblebee in and keeping silent up until the two of them were left in a booth for their conversation. "Now then, like I said, Shadow's a bit… well, frag it, she scares us some times. You don't have to talk to her if you don't want to, you can leave that up to me, but I think she's got a soft bit in her spark chamber for younglings and sparklings so she might not be as bad if she sees you."

"Okay." Bumblebee watched on as Titan punched in the frequency for his XO's external comm device, noting the Gygax area code with wonder.

It beeped for a few astroseconds before a blue and black Praxian femme flicked her side on.

"Who the fr- _Titan?_ I was wondering who was calling me from Tyger Pax, but why…" The femme trailed off as she noticed the yellow and black mechling next to the anti-armor assault specialist. She raised an optic ridge questioningly at the youngling, before pinning the white and black mech with a golden arched look. "I take it you have some interesting news for me?"

"Long story short, the younglings of Cybertron knows a bit more about us than we figured on, at least the ones in Tyger Pax do. I'll tell you the whole story later, but for right now we've got a bit of an issue I though you may want in on."

The femme laced her claws together on the desk before her, and smirked a bit wryly. "Do tell. Is it why you're calling with a youngling next to you rather than over the squad lines?"

"Pretty much, Shadowdancer. See, I've got enough to cover Bumblebee's medical fees, but not for his final upgrade." Titan suddenly hauled Bumblebee into his lap so the XO could clearly see him. "Look at this face plate; you wouldn't want to doom him to the same slag we went through, would you?"

The young mech caught on to what the Enforcer was doing, and struck the most pathetic pose he could for the femme.

Shadowdancer burst out laughing at the both of them.

"That was a bit over the top, Ti'." Still snickering, the femme messed around in her desk drawers for a data pad and flipped it on. "How much do you want for this?"

Titan shared a victorious grin with Bumblebee before turning a bit more serious. "Bout the same as what Rook dug up to help Silverbell with. We'll need something a bit more than standard for little 'bee here."

She nodded at him as she marked down the amount in her ledgers. "I've got it. I'll have to send it up there with Trick', cause I don't think I can leave the city again without attracting more attention than I can handle at the moment. So, expect him around in the next decacycle."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And…" Putting the data pad away for later, the SPARTAN tactician pointed a suddenly stern claw in the Enforcer's direction. "I want everything about how the younglings know of us, Titan. If it's some bot that can't keep his trap shut even with a Autobot gag order on it, I want to know and know _now_ , before it becomes a problem."

Bumblebee started in surprise when the femme's optics started bleeding red near the edges, but Titan placed his hands reassuringly on the younger mech's shoulder joints. "I've already got it, ma'am. Tell you later this cycle."

She nodded sharply to the Enforcer, and spared a small smile for the youngling. "Then I will talk to you later, Titan."

As the external com unit went dead, Bumblebee turned to look at the Enforcer he was with. "You were right, she is scary. Sometimes."

Snickering at the qualifier, the SPARTAN mech steered the youngling out of the small cubical. "That's Shadow' for you. Mechicidal spark with a hint of gold."

\V/

Drax wandered through the halls of the Autobot base that granted asylum to the misplaced seekers, nodding on occasion when one of the few bots that worked there recognized him either from the small number of times the SPARTAN-Bots had gotten together or from the news vids that called him the Air Commander. He really didn't know which, and to be honest, he really didn't care.

Taking a right into the hall that held the unit commanders' offices he gave a brief wave to Stonewall and Lithium as he passed the Stonewall Unit office, snickering at the less than inventive designation the old guild master picked for his recently formed escort unit. Ducking into the SPARTAN-Bot office, the seeker supposed he had no room to point finger joints in, given which unit he was a part of.

The tank himself wasn't in at the moment, so the SPARTAN trine leader took a seat on one of the uncomfortable chairs before Warcry's desk.

Drax waited three breems before some bot appeared, but it wasn't the tank he was waiting on. It was two mechs, though.

The first bot stopped cold in the doorway when he saw the seeker, a faint clang behind him letting the SPARTAN know that some bot had just run into the back of the large and battered looking mech.

Raising an optic ridge at the two mechs he didn't know, Drax gestured to the other chair. "War's not in at the moment, so take a seat."

Kup blinked at the seeker, taking in the odd build and the SPARTAN symbol on his armor plate. He had a funny feeling in his chassis that the dark painted seeker mech was another of the unit the Prime had just finished telling him all about. "Do you know when he'll be back?"

"Should be soon, don't think there was anything too important passed around the comm lines, other than the XO finally linking back up with the rest of us." Drax studied the rather jerky way the two of them were moving, and the nearly spastic way the slighter mech was fidgeting. "I take it you've been just told a rather fantastical tale involving an All-Spark and a double handful of aliens?"

The older military vet snorted harshly. "That's putting it rather mildly, mechling. I suppose you're not one of the ones this unit acquired here?"

"Nope. I'm Serria-one-one-three, Covert Ops assault specialist." The seeker gave both of them a wicked smirk and waggled his claws in their direction. "Otherwise known as Drax, the Aero Space Division's Air Commander."

"Knock it off, you pathetic excuse for a fly-bot." Warcry smacked the SPARTAN on the back of the helm as he passed the three bots in his office to get to his chair. "They don't need your type to give them fragging nightmares too. Kup, Red Alert, need something else?"

Kup frowned as the tank sank into his chair, flicking a sideways look to the seeker scowling at what was supposedly his commanding officer.

"Okay. Drax, what the slag are you in here for?"

"We're rebuilding Vos. Apparently that was the most popular idea my flock of seekerlings settled on for what the frag we're supposed to do now. You all are about to see a real big upswing in seeker enlistment first, then the more combat capable of us, me and the other two with Lightning and a few others mainly, are going back out to see where we should put the new city." Drax was still frowning as he felt the back of his helm, looking for a dent. "'stripes has asked for leave first, and I granted it so he's flying out to Tyger Pax before the decacycle ends and will come back a megacycle later."

Warcry started snickering as he sorted the data pads cluttering his desk to find one in particular. "Do you know why?"

"No. He didn't tell me that, just that he wanted some time."

"I just got done talking to Shadowdancer, and she hinted that the younglings of Cybertron know more about us than she likes. Apparently, Titan ran into a youngling that knew everything from our insignias to what we do. He contacted Shadow' about the youngling in question, some mechling named Bumblebee, and what the little terror demanded for his silence. He wants to meet a seeker."

Drax blinked blankly at the tank, until the SPARTAN-Bots' CO threw the pad he had been looking for at his helm. Snatching the device out of the air before it could make contact; the trine leader gave the display screen a curious glance, and then groaned loudly at the sight of the psyche evaluations for the SPARTANs, Tigerstripe's in particular. "I'm going to have to go there and kick his aft to leave the city and come back here, aren't I?"

Kup looked between them, confused. Warcry motioned for the seeker to hand the pad over to the older military vet, snickering harder when it appeared that Red Alert had decided that staying behind the bulk of his officer was safer than standing to the side.

Drax got up to his pedes after he handed the pad off. "As Ratchet would say, fan-fragging-tastic. I'll let you know when we actually have an itinerary for this slag, sir."

The Air Commander saluted the tank and walked out of the office, not even sparing the other two mechs a sideways glance as he did so.

"Are all of your soldiers on this?" The Security Director paged through the data the pad held, stopping at a few of the bots he vaguely recognized from watching the security feeds and reading the psychological assessments and military experiences listed for each one.

"Pretty much, except Shadowdancer herself. She said she needed another CPU shrink to do up her assessment since apparently she's not allowed to do it." Warcry smirked wryly at the other mech's grunt, sorting out the even bigger mess he had made of his desk looking for that data pad. "But other than her, it's complete as of two decacycles ago. That was the last time she had an opportunity to update it."

Now that the risk of flying objects colliding with anything had passed, Red Alert crawled out of his superior's shadow and took the chair the seeker had vacated. "Fantastical is one way of fragging putting it. How many of your soldiers are here?"

Looking up briefly from checking a data pad for its content, the tank continued sorting as he answered. "Including me, there are eight here. Refit, the apprentice medic under Ratchet; my Second in Command Galeforce, who returned after our old one deactivated; Knightblade's helping out the medics before she leaves with a little something for whoever we recruit; Drax and his trine mates, Spotter and Tigerstripe; and the _ATHENS_ herself. Two more are scheduled to return in a bit, the twins Sideswipe and Sunstreaker."

"The Prime said you have assets in Decepticon held cities as well as Neutral ones, designations and objectives."

Warcry finally stopped what he was doing to give the white and red mech his attention. "Why?"

"So I can know when they are coming back and I need to watch them."

The SPARTAN took a real good look at the mech he had helped Kup pick out for his replacement. He did it back on the Ixion briefly, but hadn't spared him a second thought since. Red Alert lived up to his designation; the mech was looking around constantly as if looking for any possible ambushes while in the more public sections of the base, even in an enclosed space he inspecting everything he though was suspicious with narrow optics until he determined it was harmless.

Warcry assumed the mech was on edge in his office, given what he knew now.

Apparently the silence went on a bit too long for the slight mech, because the security specialist glowered back at the tank staring at him. "I knew something was up, after Kalis and Kaon's fall there were two different levels of activity from the Autobots' main bases, which meant something big had changed somewhere. Obviously, I couldn't have even begun to guess about you and yours, and there is no way I can put expectations on some aliens that happened to end up like us, but I do know this; you're up to something. Whatever that something is, it kept most if not all the civilians in Vos functioning. I take it that it had something to do with that Drax and his trine, as well as your deactivated 2IC, so I'll give you as much benefit of doubt as I can. I'll find out what it is, make no mistake about that, but it can't be something like you're intending to hand over the Autobots to the Decepticons. If they knew even a small bit of the slag you and your soldiers have been doing, there would be a bigger price on your helms."

"There's a price on our helms?" The tank focused all of his attention on the red and white mech at that bit of news. Figuring out the soon to be Security Director for the Prime could wait in favor of seeing if any of his soldiers were in trouble.

"A large one for an acid green and black mech who was spotted harassing Decepticon patrols Kaon that I assume is yours from the stories they tell about him; one medium sized one for a femme in Crystal City that goes by the designation of Knightblade; there are a few for a gray femme named Rook in Praxus that were just recently posted; some white and black mech Enforcer called Titan in Tyger Pax; and the last one I know of is one for a pair of mechs in Yuss by the names of Quickgrip and Galeforce. Funny enough, all of them named are listed in your unit roster, under the maximum security encrypted servers for Iacon's officers' optics only."

"You're about to become my favorite mech here, Red." Warcry laced his hands and set his elbow joints on his desk as he processed what that all meant for his soldiers. "Trick's always made a nuisance of himself, but he's good at getting out of it fast when it comes back to bite him in the aft. Knightblade's been keeping a mech by the designation Perceptor functioning in spite of Decepticon attacks, so it goes to figure she's on that list. Rook would just laugh at us for telling her to be careful. Quick's got his Neutral mech he's been protecting up to speed on what's going on, so that should take care of itself, and Gale' is now here." Frowning thoughtfully, the tank wondered if he should pass that information on to the others or not. "Are there any for a black and blue Praxian in Gygax, or a red and black mech from Kaon?"

Red Alert had been carefully noting who was mentioned and who wasn't. "Not that I know of. I can keep an optic on the information sights that normally posts bounty hunter rewards and keep you informed."

"Those two would be the hardest to reclaim, since they're in Gygax right under Decepticon sensors." Warcry turned the information over in his processors a bit more, concluding that he should at least pass that on to his XO. "I'll give you the pad Kup's got at the moment to look though, as long as you tell me who pops up on those sights."

Said mech's attention was caught sharply by the mention of the Decepticon held city. "Who the frag do you have… your list doesn't mention a Praxian femme. That's Shadowdancer?"

Warcry nodded as he let his hands go and leaned back in his chair to kick his pedes up on his desk. It didn't look like he would get very much work done that cycle. "Shadowdancer and Silentforce, my Third in Command and our defensive specialist, respectively. Shadow's also got a youngling attached, Kynaite, who is a sparkling she rescued from deactivation and the scraplet bonded with her shortly afterwards. Orpheus, the Covert Ops assassin, is in Polyhex doing the same information gathering as my XO. Markmaker was my Second, before he blew up himself and Vos to keep the Cons from killing the civilians there, making Galeforce, our combat engineer and our new 2IC. The trine that you've probably seen a bit around the base are mine as well, Drax who is a Covert Ops assault specialist, Spotter the recon scout, and Tigerstripe who is a heavy weapons specialist."

He rattled off the names and designations of the others, as well as locations and current jobs, smirking slightly when he saw that Red Alert had pulled a data pad out and was recording on it what he was telling them.

Kup was damn near scowling at the end of the list. "You can't expect to keep all of what you are hidden if you're doing all that, youngling. The truth will come out, no matter how much the Autobots try to conceal for you. It's been pure luck since the fight outside of the base that some bot hasn't said something to the wrong bot and your secret is blown sky high."

"SPARTANs make our own luck." Before the older military vet could get disgruntled over his attitude, the SPARTAN-Bots' CO held up a hand. "We know. We would've known even without some bot spilling the bolts to the younglings of Tyger Pax, it's just we don't want a lot of attention on us at the moment. Advertising what we are at the moment would be counterproductive to our current aims; civilian defense."

The tank turned his optics to the ceiling and stretched out his spinal cables.

"Admittedly, we are oh and two at the moment. Kaon was a bit overkill for our lone mech there and Vos actually managed to kill one of us off out of four, but we've managed to reduce the deactivation tolls in both by a good margin."

The military vet had to snort wryly at that, as the SPARTAN's claim was true. The Autobots alone hadn't been able to do anything in the end about what happened to Kalis and Alithex, even knowing beforehand that Alithex would be the next target for the Cons. He was still uneasy about it all; from what the SPARTANs had been before and how they ended up as they were, but he was a soldier through and through, who couldn't argue with results. "Do you know which city is the next target for the Cons then?"

"Either Simfur or Praxus, from what Shadow' and Orpheus can gather from their cities." Warcry frowned thoughtfully for a moment, before turning his attention back to the two mechs sitting in his office. "Gale's about to go out to Nitro's to help just in case."

Red Alert blinked, then scanned his pad again. "What about the femme in Praxus? Rook?"

The tank commander of the SPARTAN-Bots snorted dryly.

"I'd wish the Cons luck, then." At the rather shocked looks that quip earned him, Warcry sighed and attempted to explain. "Rook's got what amounts to an entire army of bots trained up, under the guise of teaching them self-defense. I highly doubt anything that happens there will follow any of the other cities. It's more likely that Simfur will blow up next, given the SPARTAN we have in residence there."

\V/

Knightblade fiddled with the part she was supposed to be checking for compatibility with a normal Cybertronian frame. It was to be the cloaking system for one of the twins, once both she and Ratchet agreed on the settings for it.

She was a bit distracted from the work she was supposed to be doing, though. She and Galeforce were slated next for the rebooting after they finished upgrading the twins, then the trine, before Refit went off with the 2IC to do the same thing to the rest of the SPARTANs out in different cities. It wasn't the whole processor rearrangement that was bothering her, it was letting go of what she had once been and no longer was.

History was something her parents loved, at least she thought so. Recalling what her archeologist parental figures had wanted for her function was getting harder and harder the longer she was Cybertronian in frame, either something to do with how the metallic race dealt with large amounts of memory files they accumulated over the vorns or simply degradation of the files themselves from whatever happened after the All-Spark made a bid to keep the humans locked in Cryo-Storage alive and functioning.

She couldn't imagine that either of her parents would want her to forget them even more beyond what she had already, and it was something she herself was very reluctant to let go of. As a SPARTAN didn't really have many things that could be considered personal other than military issued equipment, she had clung to the dimming memory of her human creators through her training, augmentation, missions, and even here as something that defined her more than just a highly effective sniper.

The former human sniper frowned irritably down at the mess of wires, metal plates, and chips in her hands, dearly wishing that one of the others could remember their functions before the SPARTAN-Programs. It would be a lot easier if she could sound out the problem she was having with one of the others, they at least would have a similar frame of reference like she and Galeforce could do about their protoframes or she and Spotter about the change from instinct to programming.

Both Wheeljack and Perceptor had taken the opportunity to pull the Cryo-Tanks out of the _ATHENS_ ' cargo bay with Ratchet and Refit, to take a more in depth look at the All-Spark altered workings. This was the only reason she was getting away with worrying in peace within the relative safety of the medical bay, since both the inventor and scientist had a bad habit of pestering her about her problems.

Giving up working on the part, the femme planted her hands on either side of it on the berth she was using as a table, staring off into the distance. Trying hard to recall everything she could about the hazy two people that created her, she only vaguely noted that Xenon had entered the bay and gave him an absent greeting.

"Knightblade, is there something wrong?"

The sniper blinked a few times, storing away the few files she could recall of her creators before giving the CMO her attention.

"When _isn't_ there something wrong?" The SPARTAN femme straightened up and scowled down at the parts she was supposed to be working on again. "It's a fragging reoccurring theme in our screwed up functions."

The older medic took in the disturbed femme, not entirely surprised over her uneasy demeanor as he finished wiping his hands clean with a rag of synthetic material. "Would you like to tell me about it? On occasion, sounding out his problems works for Ratchet. Although I will not likely understand most of what is bothering you, it may help you order yourself."

"If I wanted to do that, I would grab one of the other femmes. Or Percy." Knightblade stopped pretending that she was working and lifted herself up to sit on the berth. "Can I ask you something through, since you're here?"

Xenon tossed the rag in a bin to be cleaned and nodded to the femme. "Of course. I'll even answer you."

"What do you think of us? Of both us as individuals now and what we were before becoming… this?"

The questions caught the older mech off guard, since he was expecting something more impersonal from the SPARTAN femme. Processing the question for a silent moment, he had to conclude that although it was surprising that it was coming from her, her question couldn't be that unusual for some bot in her position, if there ever would be one again. "How do I think of you now, or when I first met you all?"

"Both, either. I… don't know?"

"Come into the office then, Knight'. I'll try to answer that the best I can." Xenon waited until the confused sniper preceded him into the smallish room he used as an office with his oldest student, then led her to the chair opposite his own and took a seat after she was sitting.

"When we first met you all, the Autobot faction was in a bit of a difficult position. I'm sure you didn't know it, but with Sentinel still trying to talk the Decepticon faction down, we were losing a large number of soldiers every stellar cycle to increasing Decepticon raids on anything and everything that moved. Ratchet and I normally saw the worst of the survivors from the battles we had before you arrived, and most of those… I can only thank Primus that they held on long enough for us to get them on their pedes again. Your arrival in the middle of the battle outside of Iacon was the first one we saw where we ended in a better position than we started." Xenon leaned back in his chair, frowning at the memory files simply talking about that time raised in his CPU. "You and the rest of your unit was an unanticipated boon, something that helped remind the other soldiers that we could win. I could have only been thankful at that time, simply from my position as a medic. Of course, the moment I started talking to one of you SPARTANs I noticed something being off. It didn't help that the first femme to talk to me out of your unit was Shadowdancer."

He grinned as the sniper chuckled ruefully.

"Shadowdancer was, at the time… stiff sounding, even as she teased Ratchet over his orn to orn mannerisms. Preferring to concentrate on some problem or snag that could use her… unique touch to be solved rather than socializing with us. She had next to no concern over the condition she was in; she was even surprised that we managed to reduce as much of her pain in her left shoulder assembly as we did. That made me slightly uneasy, as it seemed that she and the rest of the bots we saw that cycle had been badly neglected for vorns. Of course, it had turned out to be worse than I had assumed, but I'm sure you know that better than I can tell you."

"That really doesn't answer my question, Xen'."

"Give me a moment. Before your commanding officers came clean with what you all were at one point in time, I was simply grateful for your assistance in keeping the bots I habitually repair functioning in any condition, if a bit worried over your past history with medical personnel." Xenon paused, letting the sniper take that in. He wasn't sure if this would solve her problem or not, but it couldn't hurt. "After I learned of what you had been, I was… disgusted with myself over being thankful for your help."

Knightblade's helm snapped up, giving the older mech the clearest 'what-the-frag' look he had ever gotten before. "What? Why-"

"Because I was thankful that you went through all that in order to provide the best assistance that we desperately needed." He lowered his optics to his desk, partly in shame for what he had thought nearly a vorn and a quarter ago, noting that there was a pad there from Ratchet about something or another that required his attention. "Even knowing the cost that you went through, I was simply grateful that you were here and that you saved as many as you did. At that point, I really didn't care what you had to endure to get here. Then I got to know more about all of you, your likes and dislikes as well as any preferences in your function, and that was when my guilt started eating away at my spark. You weren't simply soldiers even then; you had minor amounts of personality that survived whatever the other humans did to you, and your own value system. It wasn't ours, and it took me a few cycles to understand it was a very militaristic value system, but you cared in your own way about what was going on. That was the point when you ceased to be simply galactic warriors here to aid us, and became fellow Cybertronians to me. It didn't matter who you had been before, each SPARTAN was their own bot to me from that point on."

Frowning, the sniper took that in, letting the silence stretch between them for a bit before he interrupted it.

"Now, I consider most of your unit good friends. There are a number that I do not know well, but from what you and Refit have to say of them, I can only assume they have our best interests at spark. You, in particular… are a very good friend of mine, as long as you do not object to being so. Your history means less than most to me. I am simply grateful that you are here as yourself, not as some unit here to save our sparks from becoming devastated."

"So… you don't care what we came from?" Knightblade furrowed her optic ridges, putting that into perspective against what she had worried about. It was something she had always worried about, how the 'normal' Cybertronians saw them against their normally sparked fellows. It only marginally helped her with her own issue, but it was somewhat distracting.

"Not at all." Xenon smiled a bit wryly at the femme across his desk. "I am simply glad you exist at all, regardless of what you do in the meantime."

She meditated on what her own issues were compared to the mech across from her, finally concluding that she was overdue for talking her own problems out with another bot. "Thanks' Xenon."

The older mech smiled wryly at her. "I believe it is my place for gratitude, Knightblade. Thank you for being here, regardless of what you are or what you had been at one time."

"Thanks' Xen'. I think." The SPARTAN femme got up with a wryly smirk of her own, having more to consider than she had before. "I gotta… go talk to Percy... err, later that is. Have a nice orn, mech."

As the femme walked out of the office, the older mech heard the other younger bots coming back into the med bay and greeting the sniper. He grinned fondly, listening to the SPARTAN return their greetings with more personality than she had ever displayed in Iacon before.

\V/

The next cycle saw the arrival of Sideswipe and Sunstreaker at Iacon. Warcry was standing at the base entrances waiting for the two of them, and motioned for them to follow him as he made his way to the med bay. "Did you two have fun with Clearsight and Rook?"

Sunstreaker shrugged, not really caring one way, or another about answering the question. Sideswipe just grinned broadly at the back of the tank, recalling all the pranking ideas he had pulled from Rook's old mission files. "It was… enlightening."

"I bet." Warcry shook his helm as he cycled open the doors just to be greeted with a very chipper Refit.

"Warcry, sir. Knight' and Ratchet finally stopped arguing over the settings for the new parts. Hello, Sides', Sunstreaker." The former AI beamed up at all three of them as the two bots mentioned looked back briefly from the tangled collection of wires and parts they had been concentrated over.

Xenon wasn't in the med bay at the moment, but Galeforce and Optimus Prime was, the combat engineer explaining to the Prime what the new parts were intended to do, as well as Perceptor and Wheeljack.

The scientist blinked at the two mechs he had never seen before but what he helped create was going to affect, and was confused even more when his assistant straightened up and smirked over to the two. "Hel- _lo_ , you two. Ready for this yet?"

"Yes! It was slagging _impossible_ to keep up with Clearsight, much less just _follow_ Rook." The silver sword mech ambled over to where she was working with the Head Medic of Iacon, mildly interested in what was going to be attached to him and his brother. "How much stronger is this going to make us?"

"The specs say it will probably double it, with the risk of damaging your support struts if you try to use all of the torque it can give you." Before the Prime could open his mouth components to question the necessity of that, the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots rolled his optics and turned back to the red and blue mech to prevent him from even asking. "We run the same risks. They'll end up with about half the strength we have in reserve, but even we can't use all of it without breaking something important. The only reason we could get away with using it is because of the backup systems and the carbide. They're less… flexible than most metals, so we can put more stress on them in the same instant before they shatter."

"So… you may turn out to be able to use more of it." Knightblade shrugged at the two of them, Sunstreaker having wandered over to hear what was going on better. "This other one though, is the one I think you are looking for."

She used one finger joint to pick up a veritable lacework of wires and small generators connected to a copy of the swordmech's own armor.

Sideswipe looked downright gleeful as he took it in. "That's the digital camo you all have, right?"

"It's been tested to the Pit and back, against my own systems no less. This is the truest copy of my camo we can make at the moment." Grinning, the sniper hooked something up to a plug in her own wrist joint.

The armor flickered a moment, then blended in with the background of the repair berth just like the other Recon or Stealth MJOLINER variant SPARTANs could. Now used to the sight after living with two femmes who could do the same thing at will, both twins could tell where the armor plates were only by the shadows the metal cast behind it.

"You'll need to be careful with it, since you don't have the reserves of energy we do." Knightblade pulled the plug out of her wrist, letting the armor come back into view. "We still don't know exactly how much it'll drain you to keep it going for any amount of time, that's why you two are going back to Rook after you check out here. She'll help you find your limits, and report back a base gross of how long you can sustain it without risking yourself… as well as show you what it can do and what it can't."

Sideswipe couldn't, for the sake of his own spark, get the stupid grin off his face plate. This was, he decided, one of the best side benefits of working with the SPARTANs. "Is it going to become standard instillation for Special Ops if everything goes well?"

Optic ridges furrowing, the sniper shrugged as she replaced what she had moved. "That's all up to them, I think. But I don't see why not, as long as it doesn't require a generator like ours to be useful."


	27. Chapter 27

Sideswipe onlined like usual, except for the small fact that he was in a medical recovery room with his brother, and realized a few things as he stared at the ceiling while waiting for his systems to catch up with his processors.

The first being was that he and his twin had been upgraded just like Rook had said they would be, even if Sunstreaker wasn't aware enough yet to tell him so. He could literally _feel_ the difference, and there was even a reminder in his CPU that he didn't create to wait until he was back in Praxus to test out his new systems.

The second being that either Knightblade or Refit had slipped in a few things he highly doubted they shared with Ratchet into his processors along with the control program for the digital camo.

There was a… presence in the back of his CPU, one that simply monitored him at a low level and a comm line encryption key that he didn't have before. Waiting for the rest of his systems to return to their baseline normal settings so he could get up and check over his brother, he explored the new programing cautiously, flinching when the contact increased when he concentrated on it.

{ _Who the – Silver. Sideswipe, right?_ }

The silver swordmech blinked a few times, wondering where he had heard that femme's tone before. With a wince, he recalled the incident with the SPARTAN-Bots' XO and her then sparkling. { _Err… yes ma'am?_ }

Shadowdancer didn't really seem annoyed, just resigned as she continued. { _Perfect. A decacycle of surprise contacts. Short version of this explanation is you and your brother are now connected to our uplink. You can contact whichever SPARTAN you may need help from for advice or to have them check out what's got you stumped, and I can stream you vid feeds from what's going on in any of the other soldiers' cities, but contact me through this again with it not being an emergency and I will come back up there and rip your spark casing out with my bare claws. Got it?_ }

{ _Yes ma'am._ }

{ _Get in touch with one-nine-three and zero-seven-zero to get the rest of the explanation. Now get up and get moving, soldier._ }

The XO's presence at the back of his helm faded until it was back to the previous level, to where he was simply transmitting his operational status back to her.

Slightly sheepish about whatever unit specific protocol he had inadvertently smashed through, the Cybertronian SPARTAN raised himself up on his elbow joints in time to see both his brother stir and the sniper smirking at him from where she sat in a nearby chair. "Um… hi, Knight'. I can't remember, but who's-"

" _I_ am one-nine-three, technically gamma-one-nine-three but we don't use the Company identifiers anymore; Spotter's roster number is zero-seven-zero." The bluish gray and black femme crossed her arms over her chassis, noting that Sunstreaker was listening, even if he was more interested in what was different about him now. "I'm sure you both will be very interested to learn what we call you two on the encrypted comm lines, but we need to do a few things first before we get to any other interesting bits of history."

Sideswipe winced. "You heard…"

"All of us did. You have a talent for annoying that femme, you know. And you're both still alive… imagine that." Her smirk widening broadly when the swordmech winced again, the SPARTAN femme shook her helm and changed the subject. "Don't worry about it, we figured you two would stumble on a few things until you get used to it. Now then, I've woken you two up a bit early for a reason."

Getting up to her pedes, the femme checked all of the diagnostic devices Ratchet had set up before leaving the two of them in a recovery room. Once she had disabled the alarms that would have told Ratchet they were getting up early, both mechs sat up on their berths and gave the sniper their full attention.

"I'm sure you've noticed a few things we left out in telling every bot about, Sunstreaker. Your brother here just played with a bit of it, so don't do anything with the link at the back of your helm. Shadow' will ignore the first offense, then she'll come up here and kick your aft if you do it again. With that link now set to the both of you, you can basically 'borrow' another SPARTANs' specialty in a pinch, talk to Rook if you have a problem, and report things that might affect us on a whole to Shadowdancer. As well as get the updates the rest of us get about each other and the random things we get warned about." Knightblade finished detaching the brothers and returned to her chair to smirk at them. "The Covert Ops has a few things that are different from the rest of us, but I'm guessing either Rook or Trickflip, if he's still there, will tell you all about it when you get to Praxus."

Sideswipe had been carefully moving to get up, testing the responses his motor control system had now compared to what he was used to. Everything seemed to respond so much faster, and with the 2IC's warning about possible structural damage still ringing in his audios the swordmech was showing some rare caution in getting off the repair berth. Sunstreaker copied him when it became apparent that his systems reacted quicker as well.

"You've got the rest of the cycle to get used to the changes, but while you do so you both will be on the _ATHENS_ with Spotter getting the translation programs for our old language as well as learning the bits and pieces we've left out of polite conversation with the other Autobots. Next cycle you're slotted to leave to go back to Rook, and she will take you through a SPARTAN system check until Refit gets to the city and can fix anything that doesn't mesh well or proves to be too much for you, then you're going wherever Shadow' wants you to go next." Watching the both of them carefully for anything moving the wrong way, the sniper nodded to the both of them and got up. "Any questions?"

"Err… not really?"

"Perfect. Then the _ATHENS_ is where you saw it last, Spotter's waiting on you two. Try not to torque off any seekers while you're here."

With that the sniper left the two brothers alone in the room, giving a small smile to their medic femme walking in at the same moment. Refit smiled herself at the twins, unsurprised or uncaring that they were already on their pedes in direct violation of Ratchet's medical procedures for his bay. "Few system checks first, mechs. Then you're released."

\V/

Nitro blinked suddenly, pausing in the middle of dealing with some customer, and politely excused himself for a moment. Axel, sporting the third new paintjob since he had started helping the demolitions specialist with his parts shop, looked up with a measure of alarm when the Praxian approached him with a set expression. "Shadow' found a use for you."

Since there were still a number of bots browsing the store's wares, the ex-bounty hunter figured the SPARTAN was going to be rather obscure about how he was going to find out the Praxian femme's idea for him. "Okay… what?"

Shaking his helm, Nitro crooked a finger joint at him. "You recall the frequencies I gave you for emergencies? The one for Gygax, find a public external comm and call it. Then get back here."

"Sure." Axel left what he was doing there for the Praxian to finish and left the store, passing the same Enforcer who had become suspicious of the SPARTAN as well as himself as he left it.

The ex-bounty hunter gave Roulette a smirk as he left the merchant's district of Simfur, making for the residential sector. If he couldn't find a public comm there, he would be forced to use one of the two remaining ones in the slums, and he really didn't what to do that.

He found an available one on the edge of the residential sector, near the section of the city that contained warehouses and other holding structures. Punching in the number for the SPARTAN-Bots' XO's external comm unit, the mech warily looked at the blue and black Praxian femme that answered.

She didn't waste any time getting to her point. "It's come to our attention that there are a number of bounties on a few of us. I need to know if you have any problem collecting bounties on bots that just so happen to be not dead."

"Wait… what? How are the bounties not going to be dead? We have to turn in a function required component to the client when claiming our target is deactivated." Axel furrowed his optic ridges, processing what it was the femme was going to have him do.

"How do they check the parts to ensure they came from the bot in question?"

"Manufactory part manifests…" Trailing off, the mech smacked himself when he realized what the SPARTAN femme was hinting at. "You don't have manifests that have any record of the serial numbers on your parts. You all weren't built on Cybertron. Do you really think turning in a part you would just buy off the streets would work?"

"Here's what I'm thinking." Shadowdancer leaned back in her chair and laced her claws together as she spoke. "We arrange for a few 'function required' parts to be added to those lists now, and when the SPARTAN in question is ready to return to the unit in Iacon or wherever their next duty station is, you turn them in. With new paint jobs, and maybe a new designation, that SPARTAN would be free to screw up some other bot's next vorn without having to worry about something they did a city or two ago coming back to haunt them."

"I don't see why it wouldn't work… and no, I've got no problem turning in parts I know don't belong to the target as long as you assign me a bot to keep me alive when the Bounty Hunters' Guild catches on to what I'm doing."

Shadowdancer pursed her lip plates thoughtfully. "You mean other than Nitro? It's his responsibility to keep you functioning, Axel. If you don't think he can-"

"Oh! No, we're good on that front for now. I mean when they come out in force for me." The ex-bounty hunter grimaced sourly as he though back to the last time he had seen the illegal guild hall under Ankmoor. "There were a few bots I knew of still functioning in the guild that I never want after my spark, who may just find hunting another hunter a good distraction from their usual game of steel hard criminals."

"Professionals?"

"Most of them, the last time I saw them, had a Decepticon faction insignia somewhere."

"Ah." Frowning thoughtfully, the Praxian femme finally nodded to his request. "When it becomes apparent that your old guild knows what you're doing for me, tell Nitro to contact me about another bot for security reasons. I'll send him the list of the SPARTANs that can move around easily, and you two can pick backup from that."

"Thank you, ma'am."

She signed off with a brief nod in his direction, and the mech wandered back the way he had come.

Axel thought about what Shadowdancer wanted from him all the way back to Nitro's shop. He really didn't care about handing in bounties on bots with false parts, after all it was the same guild hall that gave him and Copper Shockwave's hit list on the SPARTANs initially that caused his brother's deactivation and his being indentured to the demolitions specialist for his own safety in case there were any of Shockwave's loyalists around still who could recognize him.

There were more perks to being a 'civilian assistant' to a SPARTAN than the guild had ever given out, the amount of credits for one, so the ex-alien bots had more of his loyalty than any of his old guild masters ever would.

When he reentered the shop, the Praxian shot him a furtive glance from the side of another customer, but left him alone for the moment. Confused over what it was that was bothering the demolitions specialist, the mech turned back to the data work over the shop's income for the decacycle the Praxian needed to pay the fees for his store. Just before he would have finished the last computations for the record, it hit the ex-bounty hunter what was bothering the other mech.

Nitro was bothered over what had been asked of him by his unit sister.

Barely keeping the twisted smirk off his face plate, the newly green and silver painted mech put down his work and looked in the Praxian's direction, torn between vastly amused that the mech thought the request would bother him and slightly disturbed the Praxian was projecting his own values onto him.

He supposed it was the soldier's sense of honor bothering the SPARTAN mech so badly over being asked to deceive some bot in an authority position. If he had been raised to an exacting code of conduct and rigorous ideas of what was the proper expectation for him, Axel figured he would have the same reactions as his 'employer'.

It did highlight some differences between the SPARTANs, because if Shadowdancer had no problem asking it of him and Nitro did, than what else would the Praxian femme not even flinch from, besides punching superior officers and killing those that managed to deactivate a fellow SPARTAN?

\V/

A jade streak of light barreled past Iacon's city walls, barely answering the Air Commander's challenge in time to keep from being shot out of the sky.

Quicksilver hit the ground as he transformed, wincing as his right thruster protested the violent movement after all the flying he had done over the last few cycles. Limping, the fastest seeker council member made his way to where Drax and his trine were discussing something with a few tough looking seeker mechs standing with Lightning.

The gold and green seeker trailed off when he caught sight of the fastest seeker on Cybertron, having no clue where the smaller mech had gotten to since Vos fell. The dark painted SPARTAN trine leader, when he noted that the old Air Commander had become distracted looked behind himself to see what it was and spotted Quicksilver. "I was starting to think some bot got to you and your frame was rusting on the side of the road somewhere, cause I was expecting you to be back sooner. What took so long?"

"Some of the seekers you sent me to find didn't want to talk." As the jade seeker got closer, the others could see the banged up condition of the mech's armor. There was a lot of damage to the seeker council member's armor but none of it was anywhere important, just in painful spots like just above a transformation seam or a shot that clipped a wing plate. "Interestingly enough, I did manage to talk to one of the three trines you wanted me to find out about, Drax."

The SPARTAN Covert Ops assault specialist took in the sight the other seeker made first, and nodded to acknowledge his words. "Go see the medics before we get around to talking about that. You look like a junkyard bot. Spot'?"

The smallest seeker in the SPARTAN trine broke off and grabbed a jade arm and slung it over his shoulder plating, helping Quicksilver to keep pressure off a cracked thruster as he made his way slowly to the base.

Lightning watched his fellow council member walk, or more like jump on one thruster while leaning on a seeker mech that was only a helm taller than he was, off to Iacon's med bay, then gave the Air Commander a questioning look.

Drax shrugged at his mentor's confusion. "I sent him to talk to the Decepticon aligned seekers, and give an offer to come back before slag gets worse. It'll be a few cycles before we know if anything came from it."

(ooo000ooo)

The silver and white painted SPARTAN smirked at Knightblade as he led the jade seeker to a repair berth. "Go get Xenon for me would you, Knight'?"

Blinking bemusedly at both her fellow SPARTAN and the seeker mech he had brought in, the sniper did so when it became apparent the Cybertronian her aerial brother was helping was in a good deal of pain.

Gray optics watched curiously as she walked to the medics' office. Quicksilver knew a small bit of the SPARTANs' history from once walking in on Hailstorm ranting about the unit as she tried to work out what had been done to them to create such stiff personalities after confirming Drax as the new Air Commander.

The seeker femme had been rather embarrassed that he had heard her and made him swear that he would never tell any of the trine in question that he knew some of what they had been through, but his curiosity had gotten him in trouble many times before this, and probably would again given the chance. "Who's she?"

"Knightblade, she's a… sniper, been kicking around this last vorn as a scientist's assistant and bodyguard." Spotter helped the older seeker swing his thrusters up onto the berth as he talked. "She's alright, but you get her on some scientific tangent and she'll run with it to the point you no longer understand what she's talking about."

"Ah." Wincing as the other seeker pried open the panels on his overheated thrusters, the jade seeker leaned back to take pressure off his abused systems as he added the femme to his internal list of SPARTAN-Bots.

Both seekers looked up briefly as the CMO of the Autobot followed the bluish gray and black femme into the bay. Xenon blinked at the new seeker, one neither he nor his medics could account for. "Spotter, who is..?"

"Right, Xen' this is our missing council member. Drax sent him off just before Vos fell with an errand and he only recently came back. Quicksilver, this is Xenon; he's the Autobots' Chief Medical Officer." The slight seeker handed off the council member's panel to the older mech. "How much do you know about overloaded thrusters?"

"That it's not a common aliment unless the seeker in question has done extensive traveling in a short amount of time." Checking over the seated mech's systems, the medic ignored the heat baking off the parts in question and peered into the opened panel to see if the wires had melted or any other major or minor chips had burned out. "I've heard it's supposed to be rather painful."

"I wouldn't know, 'stripes has come close to doing this to himself a few times, so you could ask him as well as Quick' here." In the middle of stripping a few wires for the older medic, Spotter noticed Refit coming up and handed off what he was doing to the little medic femme. "I've got to go back to the others about flight patterns to pick a spot for a new city, then catch up with two new bots. You're in the best servos we have, mech."

The recon scout clapped his fellow seeker on the back and swapped spots with Drax as the trine leader slipped into the med bay.

The lamed council member raised an optic ridge at the medics before glancing at the Air Commander. "Are you sure this can't wait?"

"Not much point in it. What took you so long?"

The slighter seeker scowled up at the darker seeker. "When I was between Gygax and Yuss, I was hailed by some bot unexpectedly. Apparently, Starscream wants to talk to you."

"Starscream? The same seeker that survived out of the trine that betrayed the old Prime?" Drax scoffed, greatly annoyed by the other seeker's gall. "What the frag do we have to talk about?"

Quicksilver sighed, leaning back on the berth at the medics' urging and staring up at the ceiling. "Dirge, who is part of the trine assigned to Gygax's airspace and the seeker that hailed me, passed on that Starscream is looking for options. He's not all that convinced that this 'Lord' Megatron didn't hear of the Vos attack before it happened, and that the Decepticon mech didn't just sit by as it occurred."

Drax furrowed his optic ridges at the news. "What is Megatron claiming happened?"

"That it was an unsanctioned attack, and that he had no idea that it was going on."

With a sarcastic snort, the SPARTAN shook his helm. "Right… you got a way to pass on any messages to Screamer?"

Quicksilver arched an optic ridge. "Perhaps through Dirge's trine… why?"

"Cause if you can, pass on to him to look up _Eternity's Drift_ , the bar owner there can explain each and every option he may even remotely have."

\V/

"And this one is… what?"

"Russian language file. The XO swears in it a lot, and when she gets going with it you'll need that to understand any further orders from her from that point on."

Sideswipe took the data chip, one of three different language files the silver and white seeker had handed over since he had entered the _ATHENS_ ' bridge. He already had three different ones to share with his brother including the new one, one called 'English' and another apparently something they called 'Latin', and the recon scout was still looking for more. "Why does she swear in Russian?"

"Cause _she's_ Russian." The oddly built seeker snatched something else from his station on the bridge and cast an absent grin back to the swordmech. "Some Russian Noble, actually. It was one of the more risky grabs the ONI conducted, because the family unit in question didn't believe that the flash clone they left in her place was her. There was even a big reward for any information that would lead them back to whoever snatched her."

The SPARTANs' new saboteur nearly dropped the chips he was holding from surprise. "She's a _noble_?"

"Was. Was a Demidov Princess, actually. Iron masters way back when, turned into weapon makers for the military sector in the later vorns. Stubborn as the entire _Pit_ , the members of that family." The seeker grabbed another file, the actual one he was ordered to give the twins and turned around with a broad grin twisting his face plate. "Call her Princess next time you talk to her if you really want to torque her off. I think there was a rumor floating around of her punching some other SPARTAN for that crack way back when."

With a groan, the silver mech fell back into his chair and knocked his helm on the helm rest.

"I don't need any hints for that, thanks." Flipping the Russian data chip through his fingers, the Cybertronian straightened up and looked the scout in the optics. "How did they get away with it? For stealing her from her family unit, I mean."

"You got to remember, Sides', this was in the middle of a war with a coalition of alien races that wanted to wipe humanity from the universe and it looked like they could do so without the SPARTANs throwing some serious monkey wrenches in that plan. There wasn't time or the funds to pull to look for her, even if she was a noble. And by the time any of them could have even saved her from the SPARTAN Program, Shadowdancer probably wouldn't have gone along with the idea of abandoning her unit after the heavy duty reprogramming the trainers did to keep us there." The seeker leaned back in his chair, staring off in the distance. "I'm not really sure, but I think that was just before we learned of the class threes and after ONI had gone through two other units of SPARTANs, which were over three hundred soldiers each, so they were kind of scraping the bottom of the cube in viable recruits at that point."

"Wasn't there four Companies of class threes though? I thought there was a Delta along with the Gammas."

Spotter simply shrugged and handed over the last data chip. "I've never asked, but I thought that the Delta class threes was still in training when the Gammas were done with theirs. Could mean the Gamma SPARTANs are a bit unfinished or rough from a rushed augmentation, or just that the Gamma Company was approved to go ahead with their augments before the Deltas. But this is the last one… um; second to last, history files on the humans' experiences in warfare and tactics for almost every type of war that can be waged."

Sideswipe took the latest chip with a wary look. "How extensive is this file?"

"Large." With another grin for the swordmech's dubious expressing, the seeker continued. "Humans… were more than a little violent. Wasn't really their fault, organic creatures have some internal programming, or instincts, that made them rather vicious when defending their home turf or when seeking better ground to live on. All organic creatures have something along those lines, really. Humans just… took it to another level."

Spotter tapped the chip the silver mech was holding, the one on the humans' history of war.

"Recorded a lot of it too, from what tactics worked on what terrain and how to fight even when you're outnumbered badly to different types of warrior specializing in different weapons and fighting styles. They had a lot of them… do have, if they are still alive. "

"And we're supposed to read the entire thing through?"

"You can skip most of the history lessons in it. We didn't but that was then, and human psychology in combat situations won't help either you or your brother much here. Just take a look to see how we were trained, and to get some idea of the more favored tactics used for urban and wasteland combat. Won't be the same until you actually go through it, but it'll at least prepare you for some of the stranger sounding orders." Spotter did something else at his console, shielded by the broad expanse of his wing plates from the swordmech's view. "There's also this one, but I don't know what's on it. It's from Shadowdancer, she left this for you two before she left last time she was here and that would be it for the information I have for you."

Taking the final chip gingerly, he checked the five chips he was holding before looking back at the scout. "So… if Shadowdancer is Russian, what are you?"

"I hail from the same general regions as Clearsight. We're Latino, except her ancestors hailed from a region of Earth in South America called Mexico, and mine from Italy. Not as stubborn as the Russians, but very family unit orientated. We were used to having more individuals around us to call on in case we were in trouble.

"Some would call eighteen a large family unit."

Spotter grinned widely and shook his helm at the sliver mech. "Think broader, Swipes. Human family units could contain as many as fifty at one time. That's counting all the creations of your creations' siblings, which was about seven or so per generation, and so forth. That was what we were used to before the SPARTAN Program, then that got narrowed to about thirty, then it just was reduced further through deactivations in combat, then we had the class threes, now we're here. Not quite the same thing anymore. Do you think you could use anything else?"

"A list of which number means who?"

"Heh, right. Give me a moment; I'll pull up the roster."

(ooo000ooo)

Sideswipe handed off the data chip containing the human history on warfare to his brother the moment he reached their berth room on the _ATHENS_ , figuring he would just build up a translation program for the language files and roster numbers then give them to his brother but it seemed that the hacker had taken that idea into account and had supplied a program of his own.

As the seeker's version of the program was better than anything he could cobble together, the swordmech just uploaded the files to his own processor and sent the same to his brother and then took a seat on Sunstreaker's berth to see what the humans had built up on the methods of warfare.

Like Spotter had said, the file was massive. It started out with a list of military operations to pick from; from the original Spartans and the Roman Legions' Campaigns to two World Wars; on through the human Rebellion in the colony worlds; and up to the second and third incarnation of the SPARTANs serving in the Covenant Wars. Ending at something called the HALO Ring World Activation.

"Damn."

Scowling, the gold twin opened up the file on the tactics on one of the World Wars. "This is going to take for slagging ever to read through."

"Spotter said we can stick to the recent files and-" Sideswipe trailed off as the information loaded onto the data pad his brother held, starting with a brief summary of what all went on in the First World War of Earth. "Okay. Maybe we should look though it all."

They had to refer to a number of other history files on the chip to make sense of some of it, but the tactics of a number of campaigns and the results of which were well documented in black and white vid files. After reading through it all, the brothers started going back through the files to see how humans had waged wars even before the 'Industrial Revolution'.

When it turned from documentation to speculation on how ancient, for humans, wars had been fought, the two of them went back to the First World War and continued on until they reached the end of the file the SPARTANs had on the HALO incident.

The last of it was entries by a number of the SPARTANs on what they knew of the conflict, mostly by Knightblade since it was her roster number on most of the reports with a few short summaries on the end from the few SPARTANs that were aware of what had gone on. That led into the few history files the humans had taken from the various races that made up the Covenant, and what was only noted as the Forerunners; and they spent a few more joors looking through what was there and what the truly ancient race had waged war on, the Flood.

Well into the start of the next cycle, they had started mid-orn and continued for the rest of it, they had finished skimming through the different wars and skirmishes recorded there. Since they had only read the summaries, they still had to go through and see what tactics the humans used for the battles recorded.

Deciding to take a break for a moment, Sideswipe took the pad and changed chips for the one the XO had left for them before calling it a cycle since they were slotted to leave Iacon again later that same orn. There were a number of signatures on the file, which seemed to be hacked out of Ankmoor's Hall of Records' secured servers where Clearsight worked, from the scout femme herself to Knightblade.

It started with conclusion of what the Quintessions might have been after, to the similarities between the then techno-organic race to the Forerunners, to the files the scout acquired, to what the scientist's assistant had verified as possible.

Once they had gotten through it all, Sunstreaker grunted and shoved his brother off his berth a bit too hard, tossing the pad to the other berth in the room as the silver twin hit the floor with a clang. Sideswipe scrambled up from the floor and over to his berth, snatching up the discarded pad before it could fall to the floor.

Reading it through again, the swordmech figured it wasn't going to be the last time the SPARTANs gave him a massive processor ache from something.

\V/

Shadowdancer raised an optic ridge at her latest visitor. "I'm still not sure how you intend to hide what you're going to do, but if you need to, you can hit up Orpheus for some help in a pinch… if you can stand his attitude."

Soundwave inclined his helm to her, and glanced to the back of the office at his cassettes playing something or another with her youngling. "Request-"

The Praxian sighed, rubbing the side of one of her optics with a clawed hand. "Yeah, I'll watch them for you. You won't be the first Decepticon I have dumping bots on me, Blackout's Scorponok is here as well while the mech's on some mission out of the city."

Hesitating a bit, the Decepticon mech nodded to her again and got up from the chair before her desk, intent on informing his cassettes on what he was about to do. Zephyr came in with a load of more data pads from other business that supplied the energon for the bar and smirked at her employer as she set them down, causing the other femme to regard her curiously. "What?"

"You can rip fully upgraded bots to pieces at the drop of a screw, but when it comes to the tiny ones you've got a soft bit in your spark chamber, don't you?" The helicopter ducked the extra data pad the SPARTAN threw at her helm, which got stuck in the wall just over where the femme had her shotgun hidden, and darted for the same door that Soundwave left through not an astrosecond before, laughing the entire way.

Shadowdancer frowned thoughtfully after her assistant, wondering just how that had occurred.

Not the bit of Zephyr becoming comfortable enough to tease her again, but the small bot thing.

It wasn't even just younglings or sparklings; now she even had drones and now cassettes hanging around, perfectly content in her presence. Looking down, she arched another optic ridge at the drone moping in her lap. "You need to budge up, bot. I've got work to do."

Scorponok chittered with annoyance as he moved to the floor, only to be pounced on by a speeding Kynaite the moment he was in reach. He was the first bot of his own size that the youngling had ever played with other than the femme youngling in Iacon, and the only real reason he didn't hide from Soundwave's cassettes the moment he saw them like he had done with Blaster's that same trip out of the city.

The drone forgot his funk now that he had the Praxian's adoptive creation to play with, and carried the giggling youngling back over to where the cassettes were.

Pausing in the doorway, the tactician furrowed her optic ridges as she watched them. It was conceivable that Blackout had gotten the drone from another Decepticon and it was possible that bot was Soundwave, but that really didn't explain the rather young setting of the cassettes' processors or how well they all got along since she hadn't had them all at the same time before.

Leaving them to it so she could open the bar, she started to wonder how much of the rumors about the Decepticons' Third in Command was true and what was just spread around in fear of the mech.

By the time she had gotten to the main floor of the bar, Zephyr had already opened up for the off-cycle, leaving the doors for the SPARTANs' bodyguard specialist and joining Dreadnought at the bar to help serve. Shadowdancer picked her way to the side of her fellow SPARTAN through the press of bots getting in for a cube before they either retired for the cycle or before they started the off-cycle shifts.

"We're expecting a number of bots, 'force. Everything from Trick' to a seeker bot I'm sure you can recall from Kaon."

Silentforce cast her a disbelieving look, to which she smirked at. "According to our dear aerial leading brother, he's looking for options and passed on this place to the mech. So behave if you see him, he's supposed to have gotten the message about now."

The red and black mech rolled his optics at her, turning back to glower at the bots entering the converted warehouse. Shadowdancer snickered as she went to the bar, helping Dreadnought and freeing Zephyr to circle the main floor.

By the time Silentforce had to start regulating which bots could enter by which ones left, Trickflip made it into the bar with a smirk twisting his lip plates. "Guess what?"

"No, I'm not helping you with another crazy afted scheme you've cooked up in that rusty CPU of yours. The last one we did got us arrested." Shadowdancer threw him a dark glare from over her door-wings as she assembled a tray for the small bots she had hiding out in the second story.

Dreadnought, now used to the routine when it came to the boss femme and her various relations that appeared every now and again, handed the acid green and black mech a cube of the energon Shadowdancer had set aside from the shipments she got from outside of the city to the mech.

"Hey! That wasn't my fault, and it was a galaxy ago. Besides, command sprang us after a while." Trickflip took the offered cube with a smirk, following the blue and black femme up to the second story. "You recall the littlest femme that I rescued out of Kaon? Hell's Bells is joining the 'bots."

"Really? I would have thought she would have avoided anything remotely smacking of the military when you sprang her from the city." Shadowdancer let them into her office, setting the tray down where the smaller bots could reach it before walking over to her desk and riffling through the drawers to find and draw out a digital lockbox. "Titan needs this in Tyger Pax, lose it and I will beat the plating off you. You also need to deal with that Inkblot bot while you're there."

The infiltrator wasn't listening though; he was smirking at the number of small bots running around her office. "Well, what do we have here?"

Kynaite's helm snapped up at the familiar vocalizer and the youngling abandoned what he was doing with Frenzy and Rumble and bolted over to nearly weld himself to his uncle's shin plating. "Unca Trick'! Are you gonna st-tay an play w-w-th us?"

"Depends on your carrier, little mech. Ask her."

The youngling spun around and pouted up to the femme, who rolled her optics and shrugged at the both of them. "Have at it; just get this to Titan eventually, Trick'."

When Shadowdancer left them to their own devices, the SPARTAN mech looked over the number of small bots his superior officer seemed to be watching. "So, what is this? Shadow's sitting service for the 'Cons?"

"T-th-hat-t's what-t she calls-s it-t." Frenzy hoisted himself up on a nearby chair and inspected the new mech. "S-s-o, w-who a-ar-re you-ou?"

Trickflip arched an optic ridge at the cassette's attempt at interrogation, giving the small mech points for getting higher in an attempt to intimidate him. "Trickflip, one of Shadowdancer's cohort brothers. And you all?"

The spastic looking mech scowled at him, dropping back down to the floor. "F-fren-z-z-y."

The cyber-cat looking cassette that the SPARTAN had overlooked in the corner padded forward, inspecting the parts of the ex-alien mech that he could reach. "Ravage. The flyer up there is Lazerbeak, and the other bot over there is Rumble."

"Really. And the drone under Shadow's desk?"

"T-tha-t's Scorponok-k, he's Black-k-out-t's." Kynaite pulled his uncle farther into the room, heading straight for his impressive collection of youngling sized tools.

Trickflip raised an optic ridge at the direction the youngling was going. "Erm… 'naite? Doesn't Shadow' let you play with her systems? Why are you…"

"Cause i-I'm done look-king t-through carrier's s-sys-st-tems." The young mech let his uncle go and started pawing through his collection of tools that Shadowdancer had gotten him when it became apparent that he wasn't going to stop using hers without an incentive. "Fix-x-xed her, now-w-w fix-x-x you."

"Ah." Trickflip gave up trying to question the youngling given how much his vocalizer was still screwing up on him and simply sat where Kynaite pointed him to.

Rumble made his way across the office to watch what the two of them were doing. "What's goin on?"

"'naite likes to pull a bot's systems apart and take a look. So far, I'm the second one he's doing this for. First being Shadow' herself." At the various wide opticed looks he got for that bit of the youngling's history, the larger mech rolled his optics and continued. "He knows better than to do it to some bot that hasn't agreed to it, and 'fit, our littlest sister, showed him where the pain receptors are. That and Shadow' said he was good about putting what he takes apart back in place."

"So, he dos' it ah lot?" The demolitions specializing cassette took a closer look at all the tools Kynaite was going through, and some of the abandoned, complicated looking projects that got scattered in the youngling's search.

"You could say that, or that he just likes tinkering with us. Either or."

Trickflip left at the end of the cycle, when Kynaite had sleepily replaced everything that he had taken out of the infiltrator and crashed on a couch in the office placed there just for that happening. The SPARTAN mech had to give the youngling credit, he had fixed a few wiring issues in his lower chassis that he had forgotten about seeing Refit for.

He gave the cassettes and drone in the office a salute, grabbed the lockbox Shadowdancer has set out for him and left, exchanging a nod with Silentforce as he left _Eternity's Drift_.

(ooo000ooo)

When the bar was about to close, two joors before the start of the next orn and the last call for high-grade went out, Silentforce spotted something unusual in the press of bots either trying to get in or out. There was a black and purple seeker making his way through the crowd, one that seemed to disappear from one spot and appear in another.

He narrowed his optics, waiting until the seeker got close enough to grab before snapping out a hand and catching the seeker by the arm.

Skywarp came to an abrupt halt and jerked around to see what had a hold of him, blinking in surprise at the red and black mech that had caught him. After a moment of being glowered at, the slight seeker tried to grin weakly as he placed where he had heard of a similar mech being nearly an entire vorn ago. "Heh… uh… I'm here to talk to the owner?"

The guard mech pressed his lip plates together in a thin line, but dragged the seeker into the establishment and to a staircase in the back, waving one hand at a helicopter framed femme to take over the door. Skywarp kept quiet through it all, mentally cursing out Starscream for telling him to show up at the ground-pounder's bar.

The bodyguard specialist eventually shoved him into an office looking room, where a blue and black Praxian femme looked up briefly from the desk and a number of rather familiar small framed bots were recharging on the couch at the other side of the office space. She raised an optic ridge at the seeker, then gave a brief glare at the mech that had said nothing so far. "Go, 'force. I'll be fine."

Skywarp watched as the mech hesitated, looking over to the small framed bots in the room. The seeker caught sight of two cassettes he recognized as Soundwave's in the pile of metal curled up on the couch, both Rumble and Ravage, and realized that the silent mech was transmitting something to the quadruped cassette.

Only when the cassette in question extracted himself from the pile and slinked forward to sit at the femme's desk did the mech leave the office.

Shadowdancer watched it all with an air of exasperation, tapping her claws on her desk. "Really now. I can defend myself."

Ravage just yawned at her and curled up to resume his nap. She rolled her optics again, looking to the seeker mech and extending a clawed hand to one of the chairs before her.

"I take it you're a part of the seeker trines Drax is sending to me to deal with?"

The teleport capable seeker hesitated himself, taking in the sight of his fellow Decepticons in the room before perching where she gestured to sit. "Um… yeah. You know the Air Commander?"

"Drax is technically my soldier, so yes. Over the last sixty five vorns, we've spoken a few times." The SPARTAN-Bots' XO smirked wickedly at the suddenly wary look on the seeker's face plate. "He's told me what he's sending you all to me for, but before I begin, what is it that your trine leader is looking for?"

"Change. He's not totally welded to the idea of abandoning the Decepticons, but if Megatron did know of the attack on Vos and did nothing about it Starscream's sure that he doesn't want to follow a mech like that. But without any other options, we're a little screwed." Skywarp blinked, then cast an alarmed glance to the cassette listening in on the conversation.

"I wouldn't worry about him, mech. I'd worry about your rather precarious position." Lacing her claws together, Shadowdancer leaned back in her chair and smiled at him. The sight of it gave the seeker chills. "Soundwave already knows Megatron's unstable, the question you need to concern yourselves with is this; is there a spot for you and your fellow seekers in this resurrection of the Decepticons we've got going on?"

"There's a what?"

The Praxian femme kicked her pedes up on her desk, watching the Decepticon with eerily calm gold optics. "I'm going to rip out the back struts of the Decepticon faction. Before I do that though, I have to build up something to replace the chain of command currently in use. Drax has sent you all to me, because he's not sure if he can take you all back without you facing some kind of censure from the other seekers he has. So, if I can, I'm supposed to work you into the force I'm building up now."

Skywarp blinked again, not entirely sure if the femme was firing on all cylinders. "And you're just offering this to us…"

In the space of one blink and another, the femme was no longer lounging in her chair, instead she was standing before him with a wicked grin.

The seeker reared back with a yelp, slamming his wing plates on the back of the chair harshly. The piece of furniture crashed back onto the floor, spilling the Cybertronian that had occupied it out.

"Do you really think you would survive trying to betray me? Even if your splinter of the Aero Space Division seekers do somehow manage to deactivate me, there's still the problem of what Drax will do to you. I highly doubt he'll be willing to talk again if you get me killed. Then again, Soundwave might just use this little meeting of ours to get Megatron to deactivate Starscream in that eventuality."

"Right! Sorry, sorry." Skywarp scrambled up, righting the chair again, this time farther away from the femme. "So… then, what?"

"Starscream has already betrayed a bot we knew he was supposed to be loyal to." Shadowdancer straightened up, still smirking. "I suppose this is a bit of a test. If your trine leader is serious about not being one of the bots I hunt down and deactivate when Soundwave's ready to take control, then keep your traps shut about me and what I'm doing here."

The teleporter nodded a bit franticly. "Okay, sure. Is uh… that it?"

"No. I want to see Starscream sometime soon. There's a bit of news that I'm sure he's going to be rather interested in, two bits of them actually." Strolling back to her chair, the femme smirked when she realized that Ravage hadn't moved from his nap even when she jumped the desk to scare the seeker. "One is about a virus that made its rounds in the seeker community rather fast, and the other is about what really happened just before Vos fell."

"Err… I'll tell him, but-"

"Then go."

Skywarp snapped his mouth components shut, and bolted for the door.

Shadowdancer gave him a five count head start, then glanced at the quadruped cassette that was blinking up at her. "Hold the fort down, Ravage."

She practically jumped for the doorway much like the seeker had, giving a bit of a distracted wave to Silentforce as she ran past him and activated her stealth systems before she reached the streets outside.

The bodyguard just rolled his optics, taking the stack of data pads from Zephyr to see what he could do about it with the boss femme out of the bar.

The Praxian gave the seeker a bit of a lead, easily keeping his burning thrusters scorching a trail in the sky in her sights even as she had to maneuver around the street levels of the city. The purple and black seeker finally landed on a tall building that didn't look like any bot lived there for the last couple of vorns, the ground floors had nothing but shattered glass surrounding empty frames and bare gray walls.

However the tactician noted and carefully maneuvered around a rather well put together security system and entered the ventilation system for the ruined complex.

The farther she got going up, the better maintained the vents were and the more sensors that she had to either disable or twist around. Even as fast as she was going to catch up with the seeker, she still moved as silently as her own shadow flickering in the dim lights that seeped through the vents.

Finally finding the room that the seekers that had defected to the Decepticons had turned into a hanger of sorts, with eleven seekers present. The mostly luridly colored flying bots were listening to the purple and black mech report on his meeting with her, most of which looked rather dubious about what the teleporter was saying.

"…and I think she was a few spark plugs short, Screamer. She almost acted if she wasn't really talking to me, more like at me."

"I wasn't talking to you." Shadowdancer dropped through the vent she had positioned herself above, crashing down between the bulk of the seekers and the only exit from the reinforced room they had barricaded themselves into.

She smirked as the purple and black seeker disappeared from view with a loud pop and reappeared behind the silver seeker that was the mech she was looking for. Raising up to her full height, which was still a helm shorter than any other bot in the room, the SPARTANs' XO raised two claws in greeting.

"Starscream, I take it?"

A violent movement to her left caught her optics, and the SPARTAN snapped out a hand and caught the fist a blue and silver seeker had thrown at her. She kicked the aerial mech into the wall and spun around another bot trying to attack her, elbowing an acid green seeker mech in the back plates and forcing him to stumble into another seeker and take them both crashing to the ground.

With three of his fighters down in a matter of mere astroseconds, including his own trine mate, the silver Starscream held up one hand. "Stop. Before any of you fraggers crack an aileron."

He turned ruby red optics on the femme that crashed his meeting, inspecting the slight frame dubiously as he bought his fellow seekers time to reposition themselves. She didn't look like she could have done so much as lift a seekerling, but she had no problems pushing them around to the point that Thundercracker was still prying himself out of the reinforced wall.

"Who are you?"

The Praxian femme swept him a mocking bow with a wicked grin. "Shadowdancer, Third in Command of the SPARTAN-Bots, Tactical Lieutenant and Head of the Covert Operations Division. I was also known once a long time ago as Gamma-three-four-one, physiological warfare specialist."

Starscream scowled at her, unsure if he was being led by the olfactory sensor or not. "Really now, and I suppose you have the records to back that up."

"There are no records of us and… well… I could rip your neck cables out and kill your little drones here, but I'm supposed to be recruiting you not killing you, unfortunately." Shrugging, the femme looked around the surprisingly cleaned up room, if you ignored the damage she had just done, before looking back at the leader of the Decepticons' seeker forces. "I wouldn't suggest you do what you're thinking of… cause then I will kill a few of you. I'm trying to be nice."

Skywarp swallowed audibly from behind his trine leader, leaning forward to whisper a bit too loudly, "You'll never see her move, Screamer. She did it to me, and I swear I can't move that fast without teleporting."

Starscream's scowl got progressively darker the longer the stand down went on, until he finally huffed moodily and offered the femme a seat. "You were saying?"

"I've got a few things for you, something I wasn't going to entrust to some bot I don't know." She tossed him a data pad from her subspace as she sat down, ignoring the seekers around the room still glaring at her. "But from what Drax told me, it's something you'll want to take a look at yourself."

Shadowdancer waited patiently as the seeker looked through the files she had brought along for him, inspecting the few seekers she could see from her position from the corner of her optics. Most of what Starscream was looking at was the raw data taken from her own processors about the virus Shockwave had created, as well as the original copy of the order Megatron handed down to have it made. There even was the sequence of events that occurred before Markmaker's death in Vos taken from both Orpheus and Soundwave's notes, the assassin willingly and the communication's officer by request.

She winced when the seeker exploded in an audio splitting screech of white noise, cringing again and lowering her audio receptors' pickup when the rest of the seekers joined in on the conversation. Rubbing at her now pounding sensation behind her left optic, the SPARTAN huffed a sigh and waited for the noise to die down to a tolerable level so she could try to follow along.

Unsurprisingly, it was Starscream who she caught the first coherent sentence from. "HE FRAGGING _KNEW!_ "

"Of course he _knew!_ He knew before I did, and I had four bots in the city just before the attack!" The sound of her vocalizer cut through the babble of white noise, and the seekers calmed themselves enough to hear her. "You've got to hand it to the mech, crazy he may be but he's a clever crazy. There are bots stationed around everywhere that report back to him about what goes on in the faction from just about everywhere there is a Decepticon patrol unit."

"And you know this how?"

"Cause I have a choke point on his main source of information, Soundwave. He's mine, not Megatron's." Shadowdancer grinned wickedly at the seekers staring at her. "And my cohort brother is working on becoming one of those informers. I have a precarious control on what data reaches 'Lord' Megatron, and it looks like it will only get stronger from this point on."

Starscream blinked at her, more confused now than he had started out as.

Soundwave was well known, both as the monotone Third in Command with four cassettes spying for him and as one of Megatron's main supporters in the ranks. However, if Skywarp was to be believed, the same mech had his cassettes guarding the femme when he was out of the city on some personal mission. That lent additional weight to her argument, since Soundwave apparently knew all of this and hadn't reported her to the Decepticon High Commander yet.

There was also what little he knew of her and her unit to take in consideration, both the vid of the 'SPARTANs' defending Iacon from nearly a vorn and a half ago; the red and black mech from Kaon; the new Air Commander for the seeker community; and what damage this femme had wrought in less than a breem on his own fighters. She was positively tiny for a femme, especially compared to the seekers around her, but she had the strength to kick Thundercracker into a wall and still managed to evade Acid Storm's lunge not a split astrosecond later.

Not to mention how she had somehow managed to follow Skywarp in the first place from the ground.

"I'm a little surprised it wasn't the virus that torqued you off; it was the point in which Soundwave started trusting me."

The seeker tossed her the data pad back, still glowering in her direction. "With the information there I can make up something to stop and reverse it, but that does answer a few questions I wasn't aware I had. I take it Drax knows?"

"Yes, and had one of his trine mates write up something to block it until the medics could write an anti-virus for it." Shadowdancer snatched the pad out of the air with one clawed hand without even looking, returning it to her subspace pocket. "So?"

"I'm listening."

"Our purpose here doesn't have to be at odds. I'm guessing you're here because you're tired of the ineffective Governing Council of Cybertron and the gross misuse of power. Help me recreate the Decepticons into something that won't destroy the whole of Cybertron to get their way, and there will be a Governing Council or something similar to rebuild instead of simply rubble."

Starscream glared at her, still suspicious of her intent. "And what is it you're doing here?"

"Raising a youngling and trying to ensure he will still have a world to safely function in." Shadowdancer smirked at the surprised expression that crossed the seeker scientist's face plate. "If you interfere, I will kill you all. This isn't something you can dabble in and walk away from later, this is something I will enforce with the portion of the unit of war bots I have at my command."

The SPARTAN-Bots' XO got up, still grinning.

"I can assure you, you'll never see me coming if you cross me."

She disappeared from their optics before she reached the doorway, flickering out of view from her pedes up to her helm's chevron.

Ramjet and his trine bolted for the doorway, trying to see if they could spot her before she got out of the building. Slipstream darted for her computer console, checking over the security system the Praxian femme must have bypassed at some point while infiltrating the building even as Skyquake checked over their still downed trine leader, pulling him off Dreadwing with Sunstorm's help.

Starscream watched it all with a thoughtful expression, even as Thundercracker worked a kink out of his shoulder joint from being kicked into a wall and approached him. "Femme's got some bolts, for sure, even if barely half of that is true."

His silver trine leader pursed his lip plates for a moment. "I think we need to have a talk with Soundwave when the mech comes back."

\V/

Shadowdancer let herself into her bar, freezing in the act of relocking her doors and turning softly glowing optics on the pair of red ones staring at her from the staircase. "Thank you, Ravage. I hope I haven't kept you up too long."

The feline like cassetticon snorted at her and padded the rest of the way down the stairs into the dim main room. "Not really. What did you do?"

"Who said I did anything?" Lightly kicking the doors to ensure they would stay closed, the femme skirted around the tables with chairs stacked on them and made for the bar. "Why does it have to be that I did something? Can't a femme go for a walk?"

"Sure, but a walk doesn't include bolting after a seeker with a high-grade chugging grin." Jumping up to one of the stools left down simply in case one bot or another needed to refuel, Ravage stared at the Praxian's door-wings until they twitched and the femme herself threw him a wry smirk.

"If you really want to know, I was recruiting for my little operation here. And… I never get as much fun as I want with this place, so I took advantage of an opportunity." Shadowdancer poured the cassette some of the _ATHNES_ ' mid-grade in a shallow cube and took the rest for herself, leaning against the counter and watching the mech styled after a cyber-cat. "What does Soundwave think of Starscream?"

"Uh… nothing really. We've not had much contact with the seekers. He's a scientist type, right?"

"I've heard some rumors to that effect, yes." Tapping her claws on the bar, the femme frowned a bit. "Something about being a part of the Scientific Community's explorers sent out a long time ago. I'm not sure what happened when he came back to Cybertron, but I can find out easily enough."

The cassette frowned himself, thinking about everything he had ever heard of the seeker in question. "Didn't he betray the last Prime?"

"Yeah, I've got to watch that one a bit closely. But if this works, it'll help keep this from imploding when Megatron learns of what I've done."

\V/

Soundwave came back to Gygax two cycles later, with something rather curious in tow.

Having been warned by her assassination inclined brother about what it was the cobalt mech did in Polyhex, Shadowdancer calmly watched Ratbat flit around her office and finally taking a perch near Lazerbeak and peering back down at her.

"I've got to admit, I didn't think you really would have been able to hide him in plain view like this. I'm impressed, but you're not going to be able to reformat half of the Decepticons into cassettes without raising suspicions about what it is you're doing."

The communications officer's newest cassette squeaked at her, still too new to his reformatted systems to really understand anything but her tone yet.

"Will he recall anything about his previous function like that, or is it completely gone?"

Soundwave shrugged and looked to Ravage, who had curiously enough curled up by the femme's pedes under her desk. The quadruped mech copied his master by shrugging. "I recall nothing, and I'm the oldest."

Shadowdancer blinked, surprised, and craned herself around to peer at the mech at her pedes. "Really? Do I want to know or not?"

"Not really. It was a really long time ago." Ravage stretched and got up, padding over to the blue painted mech.

She snorted at the cassette's reply. "Cute. Well, the only other bit of news I have for you is that you may be approached by Starscream sometime soon about joining us in this little club of ours."

The Third in Command of the Decepticons arched an optic ridge at her, and the femme gave a shrug of her own, grinning wickedly.

"Observation: Seekers are known to be flighty."

"Not when the mech you're supposedly following to provide a better way of function destroys your city and attempts to offline your fellow seekers because he wanted to see how it would work out." Shadowdancer watched idly as Ratbat explored the rafters above her helm. "I think he's properly motivated to work, or at least play nice with me. Especially since he knows that I can kill him or any other bot he throws in my way the moment he tries anything."

Soundwave blinked behind his semi-transparent visor, recalling his own incident with the femme in question proving that she had the skills and ability to back up her threats.

He dryly wondered if she had done the same thing to Starscream as she did to him, or if it had worked out differently for the seeker.


	28. Chapter 28

Rook looked up from the minor amount of data work she had to complete for running her dojo the legal way when the twins walked into her study, neither looking quite as bad as they had the first time they arrived to her home.

She pursed her lip plates as she inspected them, as she hadn't been expecting them for another few joors at the earliest and a full cycle at the latest if they stuck to the normal speed limits of a Cybertronian. "Have fun pushing it?"

Sideswipe collapsed on her couch, nowhere near as sore as he had been the first time he had been to Praxus, flexing one hand with a stupid grin on his face plate. "I wondered after Shadowdancer pinned Sunny to a wall with one pede, just how much you all differed from us on in just mechanics, but this is just… damn."

Sunstreaker scowled darkly at his brother, refraining from lashing out at the silver mech for the hated nickname because he didn't want to damage the saboteur's furniture.

"I'm glad you like it, but now you need to relearn how to move and fight." The gray femme held up on hand before either could generate a protest. "You're systems are stronger, and we need to know how much you can bring to bear at any one time to deploy you both effectively… and you now run the same risk we do in damaging things you don't intend to destroy by accident. Control is the key here, cause if you can't do it consciously then you'll get the same blocks that half of our number operates with."

That got both of their attentions, and as the gold twin glowered at the very idea the swordmech considered her words and realized what she was talking about. "You have a block?"

"I have several, and you two get to see the difference the moment we start testing your limits." Rook smirked a bit tiredly at them, waving one hand dismissively. "They are annoying, but to keep from killing any bot that happened to startle me or to keep from simply deactivating some bot that gets in my way I need them. I'm the only other Covert Ops bot, besides Drax, who has them in our part of the unit. Every other bot has them as well, and they've kept us from causing some serious incidents already when our warfare oriented training and programming clashes with facets of civilian life."

"That's… both ruthless and considerate of you."

Getting up, the SPARTAN femme's smirk grew wicked. "Well, that's Shadowdancer for you. Common, let's go."

Sideswipe blinked up at her, surprised. "Now?"

"No time like the present." Shrugging at the aghast expressions aimed her way; the saboteur came to a stop just before the brothers. "Trust me, it rarely gets easier from this point on."

(ooo000ooo)

Since it was rather late in the cycle Rook took them both through an ever more complicated twisting route around her assigned city, letting them see how much effort they now had to put into following her as opposed to when they were following Clearsight around Ankmoor. They managed to keep her in sight through all of it, barely in some parts where they miscalculated how much force they needed to reach whatever perch she had jumped to and even when she started releasing some of her restrictions.

The SPARTAN saboteur figured the playing around they did between Iacon and Praxus helped them somewhat in getting used to how the altered systems responded, and could at least plan to have to spend less time on it than she would have for bots that followed their suggestion not to play with it on the way.

With less than a few breems before she was supposed to open the dojo for the cycle, Rook lead them back to the boarder of the slums where she lived. Both of them still looked rather haggard as she unlocked her doors, but not nearly as bad as Sideswipe had looked before when she was showing him the ropes of being a saboteur.

Cooling fans going herself the femme gestured to the second floor, where they both had rooms to crash out in. "Not bad, mechs. I would say you two should improve the more you get used to it. When I'm done here for the cycle, we'll go outside the city and test out those stealth systems. I suggest you refuel sometime between now and then, and tell me how much it takes for you to get back to your normal levels."

"You're fragging unreal, femme."

Smirking as the brothers passed her, the SPARTAN responded in a way neither could argue with. "I've been doing this longer than you have. Besides we're just getting started with the both of you."

\V/

Trickflip spent some time in Tyger Pax just looking around the city before going to see Titan. He had only spent brief amounts of time in comparatively safe cities as opposed to one that were Decepticon controlled or Kaon's still contested streets.

Even when he was in Praxus he still had a hard time not looking for the next bot that might attack him simply because he or she could. Getting slightly unnerved by the lack of violence he was used to, the infiltrator pinged the SWAT Enforcer's comm line to get an address for him.

He dropped off the XO's lockbox at the barracks room Titan lived in, taking some time to poke around the other SPARTAN's living space until he got off shift. For his troubles he nearly got an optic full of laser fire when the Enforcer spotted him rummaging through his small collection of stuff.

Titan huffed as he lowered his converted M6 rifle, scowling at the infiltrator blinking innocently up at him. "Gee, thanks for the near spark attack Trick'. Fragger."

"I was curious… and you were taking too long." The acid green mech replaced what he had messed with, taking a seat on the Enforcer's berth and smirking at his fellow SPARTAN as he patted the box he brought into the city. "Special delivery, straight from Gygax, courtesy of our dear XO. Question, what is it you needed from Shadowdancer?"

"None of your fragging business."

"My, aren't we grumpy this orn."

"Nope, in a rush." Titan rummaged through his collection of data chips, finally taking one marked in red and tossing it to the infiltrator. "That's Inkblot's address. If you're caught, don't mention me. Now get out."

Trickflip flicked him a salute and left, flipping the chip over his finger joints with a wry grin on his face plate.

Titan waited only long enough for him to get out of audio range before tossing the box in his storage closet and locking up again.

He was late for meeting up with Tigerstripe.

(ooo000ooo)

The largest seeker of the SPARTANs' trine was waiting for him near the Youth Sector that Bumblebee lived at, watching the younglings play in the park during a break in their lessons.

Tigerstripe glanced over as the Enforcer walked over to him, one optic ridge raised. "You've been blackmailed by a youngling, that's… pretty pathetic, Ti'."

"I'm well aware if the rest of the unit finds out about this I'll never live it down, 'stripes." Rolling his optics, Titan punched his fellow class III SPARTAN in the arm by way of greeting. "How are you getting along with the seeker set? For that matter, how's Drax and Spot' dealing with the relocation?"

"Eh… could be worse, really. Half of the seekers are scared of me on sight simply cause I'm probably the biggest they've seen not intended to operate in space, and my trine mates are fine. A little irritated by the close quarters we're being forced into, but again could be worse." Shrugging, the seeker started walking to the Youth Sector's entrance with the SWAT Enforcer tailing behind him. "How did you get them to agree to let me meet this youngling, anyways?

Titan grinned wickedly at Tigerstripe's back plates. "By claiming that you're here to spread awareness for seeker particularities. Congrats, you're a guess speaker."

He nearly ran into the seeker's wing plates when the larger mech stopped in his tracks. "Please tell me you're joking."

The heavy weapons specialist turned and caught his brother before the slightly smaller mech could back up out of reach.

Holding up his hands as high as he could when a seeker had hold of his arms, the white and black SPARTAN snickered a bit. "I'm joking. I've been added to Bumblebee's record as a temporary Guardian until his final upgrade, and as my cohort brother you're allowed to see him with me."

Tigerstripe scowled at the mech he had a grip on. "I would suggest you stop laughing, Ti'. We've never tested to find out if one SPARTAN can break another, but I'm perfectly willing to try at the moment."

A few snickers escaped the ground-bound SPARTAN, but Titan managed to control himself after the seeker started tightening his grip. "Look, just stay here and I'll go fetch 'bee, alright?"

The heavy weapons specialist rolled his optics, but let go of his brother. Still grinning, the SWAT Enforcer walked into the Youth Sector and swung by the office just long enough to clear Bumblebee's schedule for the rest of the orn.

Walking down the halls of the building to where the secretary femme had told him the youngling was at, Titan stopped now and again to peer at the art projects or other random objects on display while he waited for Bumblebee's latest class to be done.

Once the classes let out, the SPARTAN had thoroughly bored himself looking at the amateur art, glaring at something that was labeled as an optical illusion.

This was how Bumblebee found him, still glowering at a twisted, multicolored stature. He had been told by one of the Youth Sector workers that his Guardian was here to see him and had headed off to the offices, figuring that the white and black mech had been sidetracked on his way to his classroom.

The yellow and black youngling raised both optic ridges at the mech who was his theoretical role model, and tentatively tapped the SPARTAN's thick armor plates. "Are you okay, Titan?"

"What is this supposed to be?" The SPARTAN tilted his helm to the side, but the statue didn't give up whatever it was it was hiding.

"The… uh, it's a replica of one of the statues in the Helix Gardens in Praxus. Apparently, it's more impressive when it's ten times bigger and actually turning."

Titan blinked, and peered closer at the label just under the statue. "I knew that."

The youngling sarcastically nodded slowly at his claim. "Sure you did. What's up?"

Blinking down at the young mech, the SWAT Enforcer lightly cuffed the bot on the back of the helm as he started walking to the exit of the building. "Do I have to have a reason? Can't I just come to see you?"

"Well, you could, but you never do. There's always been a reason for it." Bumblebee blithely informed the older mech as he trotted along, jumping down the steps where he met the Enforcer. "The first time you sprang me from my classes was when there was an art history appreciation unit, and you took me to get goodies instead because I complained about it to you the cycle before. The second time-"

"Okay, 'bee. I get it." Titan grabbed the youngling and planted one of his hands over the runaway motor mouth. The last thing he needed was that getting back to the XO, who with her own youngling might get annoyed with him over it, and they were reaching where he had left Tigerstripe. "Just… pipe down, would you? You're going to get me in trouble."

Bumblebee shook his helm to dislodge the hand. "With who?"

"With me. And I'm going to remember that, Ti'." The large seeker smirked at the anti-armor assault specialist's groan, waving one clawed hand at the youngling pinned under his brother's arm. "I take it your Bumblebee then."

The young yellow and black mech gaped up at the seeker framed SPARTAN, as he was the biggest bot he had ever seen in his relatively short function.

Titan sighed and set the youngling down on his own pedes, turning to scowl at his fellow SPARTAN. "Really? One little crack against your disinclination to socialize with fully upgraded bots, and you're going to threaten me with the XO? You're cruel, 'stripes."

Tigerstripe shrugged at the Enforcer, amusedly watching as the action glued the youngling's attention fast to his wing plates. "You started it."

(ooo000ooo)

Trickflip arched an optic ridge, watching his brothers mildly bicker over who started what while the youngling they brought out of the Youth Sector listened in avidly.

Since he now knew what the Enforcer had been hiding from him, the infiltrator decided to get on the other reason he was in Tyger Pax before joining them simply to annoy the anti-armor assault specialist.

Inkblot worked in the government sector, just like Shadowdancer had theorized and Titan had found out through his networked Enforcer's database. Slinking around the edges of the working block of cubicles Trickflip watched idly as the sparkly black mech worked, sourly processing just how much politicians seemed to screw good things up even in this galaxy.

Stalking the mech was sparkling's play, he had no inclination to stop on occasion and see if he was being followed or even altering his predictable route home to throw off even a half-sparked pursuit. If Trickflip hadn't been a Covert Ops trained SPARTAN, he would have assumed it was just how the civilians operated.

However, the infiltrator was eternally suspicious of everything, having dealt with an uncountable number of situations that were more than they appeared at first glance over his function than he wanted to recall. He may not be as obvious about it as his commanding officer, but something was screaming to his CPU that something about the bot was wrong.

Letting Inkblot gain an even wider lead, the SPARTAN tried to figure out what was so wrong that his plating was itching like it was rusting on the underside.

He finally realized what it was when the bot seemed to reach his destination.

Inkblot was one of the bots confirmed killed in Kaon when the old Air Commander betrayed Sentinel Prime.

Whoever this was, he wasn't Inkblot.

Trickflip gave up the idea that he was going to get to play with his brothers as he stalked around the building the mech posing as a dead bot entered, activating the emergency link with the XO.

{ _Three-four-one, we have a problem._ } He told the tactician what he had figured out, and by extension every other Covert Ops bot, or SPARTAN working with the Covert Ops, on Cybertron.

Shadowdancer didn't even sound shocked at the information, just revolted. { _Three-three-seven? Was this mech on the deactivated list?_ }

{… _yes ma'am. All of the bots that made up the old Prime's entourage were deactivated with him._ } Silentforce sounded confused over the link, unable to figure out how the bot had the credentials of Inkblot if he wasn't him.

Halfway across Cybertron, Sideswipe removed his arm covering his optics and stared up at Rook's ceiling, unable to ignore the transmission even in favor of the last bit of his recharge cycle. { _Any chance it's just a bot stealing another's identity? It happens from time to time._ }

{ _That's a good suggestion, Silver, but it doesn't explain how he knows so much about us. If it just was the designation, I would have to agree with you._ }

The fact that the tactician he irritated on occasion didn't immediately throw out his counsel with a sarcastic comment, like his other commanding officers had before her, threw the silver swordmech for a bit of a loop and gave him a small amount of courage to argue with her. { _It might, ma'am, if he was once one of those political spies that like to plague well known bots and try to find blackmail material on them for gaining under the table favors._ }

Shadowdancer was silent for a few breems, calculating out that possibility. { _That's probable… one-nine-six, don't confront him about it. Gather what you can first and report back. Silver, are you free to move yet, or is one-two-seven still testing you?_ }

Sideswipe blinked blankly at the ceiling, wondering how to answer.

Rook took over for him even as she taught her class a floor below. { _I haven't tested the stealth systems, but he's about where you expected them to be, three-four-one. If you want him, he's good for deployment_.}

{ _Good. Zero-one-five, keep close to that youngling and watch him, two-six-zero help him out with that. Silver, report to one-nine-six in Tyger Pax, I'll sneak you into Polyhex personally when you're done there. One-two-seven, time to close up shop again, take Gold to Polyhex and ensure one-four-four knows what to do. One-nine-six, you have three joors to check this false bot out. Report back once you have the required information and when Silver gets there. Move out, SPARTANs._ }

The bots numbered gave acknowledgements as they signed off, the link collapsing when Trickflip pulled out of it.

\ V/

Rook ended her last class a few breems early, something not entirely unusual for her, but the warning that the dojo wouldn't be open the next few cycles caused another spat of gossip to rise up as the paying bots left.

Rolling her optics at their antics, the saboteur placed the rather well used sign that she wouldn't be open for a while in the great windows that lit up the dojo's main floor and bolted to her second floor. She grabbed Sideswipe before the swordmech had gotten very far, pulling him into her room. "You're going to need this, mech."

She pulled a couple of dusty cubes from out of her storage closet and handed them to the silver mech. Sideswipe subspaced two and pried one open, caching a glimpse of the softly glowing energon inside. "What-"

"Mid-grade, the _ATHENS_ ' own brew. One cube now. One in Central, Hold's going to let you crash at her place. One when you get to Tyger Pax, Trick' should have a temporary place set up by the time you get there." She pushed him out of her room even as she spoke, turning her helm to the side to address Sunstreaker as they passed the gold mech. "Be ready to leave again in a few joors, I'll be back shortly."

She refrained from pushing the mech down the stairs, figuring he wouldn't appreciate it. But even as they were leaving the dojo she was rattling off information she was certain he was going to need.

"I'm sure you've noticed that you're faster than the transports now, and we're going to abuse the Pit out of that facet. You're tires are not going to stand up to it, you'll have to get them replaced in Tyger Pax but Titan should know where to go for that. You will have to have Trickflip do a field test on your stealth systems before you two get up to any trouble. Stick to the back roads, you won't be able to go as fast as you need to on the main highway. Any questions?"

"Um… yeah, one. What the frag just happened?"

Rook came to a halt, grinning broadly at the baffled swordmech.

"Shadowdancer approved of you." She wrapped him in a plate cracking hug, swinging him around for emphasis. "I'm so proud… I think I might cry. You've upgraded right before my optics, Sides'."

Alarmed, the silver mech pushed out of her hold, mildly surprising himself when he didn't damage her plating in the process. "You're fragging weird, Ro'."

Still grinning, the femme shrugged idly. "That's what the others tell me too. Now, don't worry. By the time you get to Polyhex, Sunny will just be as surly as you left him, if a bit more deadly."

She saluted the mech and retraced their steps back to her ghetto dojo.

\V/

Trickflip reported back three joors on the dot after he had cut contact with the rest of them, sounding rather disturbed. { _Three-four-one, it looks like a fragging horror vid._ }

{ _Well, that's eloquent. A bit more with the details please, one-nine-six._ }

{ _Inkblot's not the only bot this mech… err… femme? is mimicking. There's a whole collection of armor, parts, and spark signature copying devices in the basement of the building I followed this bot to. Lined up neatly on the walls, according to which bot it came from. As well as a number of things I can't identify without one-nine-three's help._ }

Sideswipe nearly swerved off the side road he was driving down, and he even felt a faint trickle of surprise from the XO's part of the link. Rook managed not to knock Sunstreaker out when she jerked while prying one of the lids to the underground tunnels they were going to use to get from Praxus to Polyhex, accidentally ripping the metal lining the hole in the ground. Orpheus, safe in his little cubical room in Darkmoor, started laughing wickedly even as Silentforce pressed the pads of a few fingers against his optics. Shaking his helm, Drax continued to listen in only because it might affect his trine mate.

{ _Well… that's disgusting._ } Shadowdancer summed up what the entirety of her Covert Ops bots were processing in a few words. { _Have you managed to find any type of record or something similar?_ }

{ _Can't hack it when… uh… it's staring at the console._ }

{ _Watch the building, see if he… or she comes out as any other bot. Do not engage until you have proper backup. If he… um… she, frag it, if_ it _leaves, get in and see what you can find on the computer and get out._ }

\V/

Holdout wasn't surprised to see him show up at the Supply Office she worked out of, and Sideswipe spent an exhausted moment wondering what she knew about why he was on his own in her city before the femme pressed a digital key in his hands and sent him off to recharge at her living unit.

Leaving the Autobot base, it was a little strange to be in one without his faction insignia proclaiming him a part of the faction, the mech tiredly plodded his way to the tracker femme's flat.

She woke him five joors later, telling him to refuel before leaving again. The rather large Wrecker mech sitting on her couch saluted him as he left, the SPARTAN femme pressing another cube like the ones Rook had given him into his hands, telling him it was 'just in case'.

With little more than half of his trip left before him, the swordmech wryly agreed with the other saboteur's assessment of his tires. At this rate, they were not going to last for much longer past Tyger Pax's city limits.

He ran the last few miles, not trusting the worn synthetic material to hold up under the abuse. Trickflip was waiting for him near the start of the Government District, where the XO had directed him to once he had gotten in sight of the city.

The infiltrator looked over the travel worn mech, smirking slightly at his nearly bare of tread tires. "Figured you would have to run for it. Come on, I'll brief you after we hit up the tire shop Titan uses. He's a bit heavier than you, but I don't think it will make much of a difference."

Sideswipe, despite being a bit lower on energy than normal, wasn't as tired as he thought he should be after such a long trip. Following the other SPARTAN while trying to work that out, the two of them made it to the shop the Enforcer gave the infiltrator. "How is this possible?"

"It's the energon. The All-Spark created it, and the _ATHNES_ still has a large amount in reserve. We get a couple cubes every decacycle, and use it to shore up any unexpected energy depletions when they occur." Trickflip shrugged and held the shop's door open for the swordmech. "You and your brother both have a surplus as well, you'll get it once you have an assigned and stable station like the rest of us."

Satisfied with the answer, the silver mech silently endured getting his tires changed and left the shop with the infiltrator not a breem later. "So?"

"I got into that… uh, bot's records. Damn, but this is getting confusing." Trickflip rubbed the back of his helm with one hand as he led the way to his rented lodge room. "It's got seven different bots it mimics, calls itself Mirror. And, uh… it's after Titan, or any other SPARTAN it can lure in with its name dropping."

Sideswipe followed the acid green and black mech up a flight of stairs to the room the tactician had paid for while they were working under her orders. "Any SPARTAN? How did he… err… it find out about you all?"

"Shockwave. Mirror was one of his little pet projects to replace key bots in his way, and when the XO killed the puppet master the puppet continued on without orders picking out targets that drew its attention. Nitro's got orders to comb through the dead mech's base and see if he can find any more little surprises left for us to deal with." Collapsing on one of the two berths in the tiny room, the ex-alien SPARTAN examined the Cybertronian one. "I'd suggest you rest up while you can. I've seen weirder slag in my function, but _its_ little workshop will turn your tanks."

"When do we-?"

"One more joor, mech."

(ooo000ooo)

While Sideswipe didn't purge his tanks, it was a narrow escape.

After Trickflip had snapped Mirror's spinal column near the base of the neck and offlined the bot when it came back to do what it intended to do, the two of them spent some time hacking the records it had kept and erasing everything that mentioned the SPARTANs even if it was only in reference to something completely unrelated.

They left the rest of it in place, as the infiltrator casually remarked that he would place an anonymous tip to the Enforcers of that precinct to get them to clean up the mess the dead Decepticon Military Commander had left behind. The acid green mech also spent some time arranging the underground room so it looked like the bot had deactivated when some of the armor pieces had fallen from their magnetic holders.

It wouldn't stand up to an in depth investigation, but at first glance it would look like it had simply been an accident.

With that done and over with, the two of them paid a visit to Titan in his new flat. The SWAT Enforcer let them in without a word, only an arched optic ridge.

"Titan, Sideswipe, our new saboteur. Silver, this is zero-one-five, anti-armor assault specialist." Trickflip waved a hand at the white and black Spartan. "He can get a bit, dramatic. So please, don't encourage him."

Ducking the swat from the marginally larger mech, the infiltrator grinned.

"So, wanna hear what we found out?"

Inspecting the bitter edge to the other SPARTAN's grin, the Enforcer shook his helm. "In a bit. You do know why I'm here instead of at the barracks now, right?"

Bumblebee, hearing his new Guardian's vocalizer coming from the entry way, darted out to see who he was talking to, Tigerstripe in tow. "Hi ya, mechs! Who are you?"

Sideswipe blinked down at the youngling blankly, as Trickflip's bitter smile lost its edge and became a bit warmer. "Some of your new Guardian's brothers. I take it you're Bumblebee?"

"I didn't tell him slag." Titan interjected before the youngling could start asking about them. "But he knows we're SPARTANs."

The infiltrator's optic ridge rose sharply as the yellow and black young mech grinned up at him. He cast a stern look to Sideswipe, with a transmission to fill the two of them in as soon as he distracted the youngling. "Well, 'bee. I can tell you I'm a part of the Covert Ops."

As the acid green and black mech expertly chivied the younger mech on, the swordmech looked up to the Enforcer curiously. "How did this happen?"

Titan's lip plates screw up in a wry grin. "It was the only way to keep an optic on him, since that was Shadowdancer's order to me. In order to watch him for these last two cycles instead of slinking around and possibly being too late to stop whatever Shadowdancer was concerned over, I had to become his permanent Guardian instead of being a mere sponsor for his upgrade."

"And has nothing to do with how you panicked, _again_."

Sideswipe smirked a bit when the white and black mech raised his middle most finger joint straight up with the rest of them curled to his palm and showed it to the massive seeker. He had figured out real quick that the gesture was insulting among the SPARTANs.

"So, mechs. As to what I'm doing here…" he explained all of it, starting from the moment Trickflip had contacted the rest of the Covert Ops bots to what they had done to the underground horror shop of Mirror's, "…and Trick's mostly certain he was after you, Titan."

"Ah… well, frag me. And here I was thinking the XO was over reacting a bit. Should've clued on it was more serious than I thought when she didn't even quibble over the cost of me taking Bumblebee in." The Enforcer rubbed the back of his helm sheepishly. "Thanks for coming all the way out here, Sides'. I know you're supposed to remain with your brother until all of your training was done."

A bit uncomfortable with the gratitude for mostly watching another work, the silver mech shrugged. "It was… well… it was disgusting, really. I think you owe me a cube of high-grade."

Titan barked out a laugh, slapping the slighter mech on the back hard, nearly knocking him off his pedes. "I think you'll get along just fine with your fellow Ops bots, mech. Come on, while Trick's got 'bee distracted. I've got some high-grade around here somewhere."

\V/

Refit got her proposed traveling schedule checked with both Warcry and Xenon, the SPARTAN-Bots' Commander because he was her superior officer even if she was working in the med bay and Xenon because the older mech signed off on all of the travel any Autobot medic undertakes even if the trip isn't strictly faction related.

Even if the former AI didn't wear the faction insignia of an Autobot, it was mostly a forgone conclusion to most of the high ranking bots in Iacon that the only reason she hadn't joined yet was to keep an optic when needed on the more dangerously living bots in her pack of soldiers.

While she was getting her proposed itinerary checked out with Galeforce the two of them heard what Trickflip and Sideswipe found in Tyger Pax as Warcry reported the incident to Optimus Prime and Ratchet, both of whom had gotten a memo about the trouble in the city from the tank.

Refit blinked blankly as she tried to puzzle out how that was done. "I wasn't aware that was possible… wouldn't that hurt to remove and reattach key parts like that? Those are not the parts of Cybertronians that pain receptors can be turned off in."

Galeforce spoke up before the yellow medic could educate them all on how it was possible the Mirror bot had become so many different bots. "Not the weirdest slag I've ever heard."

Optimus shook his helm to indicate he didn't want to know what was weirder, still looking over what Shadowdancer had passed on to the tank commander from the Covert Ops section of the SPARTAN unit. Ratchet and Warcry, on the other hand, exchanged a look and pinned the combat engineer with two identical questioning stares.

Rolling his optics, the gray and green mech elaborated. "I've actually seen the Flood take over a host just before my return to Reach, and that was probably the most disgusting thing I've ever seen with my own optics. The poor hosts are practically subsumed entirely, and turn into pale, grotesque mockeries of what they once were. Fraggers are stuck like that until something takes pity and kills them."

"You were the one to donate the vids of the Flood to our little introduction brief, right?" Warcry winced and rubbed the bottom of his jaw plate. "I know you and Knight' coordinated the Intel for that, but I didn't know it was you who did the imaging. I thought Spotter did that."

"Naw, he just compiled the whole thing." Stretching his arms behind his helm, the combat engineer nodded to the data pad that contained his and the little medic's proposed plan to reboot the rest of the SPARTANs. "So are we good to go, sir?"

Snatching up the pad in question, the green and black tank looked over the route quickly so he would know where they would be at what time. "You're going to use Central as a resupply station? Do you really think anything will get seriously wrong in simple reboots?"

"Nothing is ever simple when it comes to SPARTANs, sir." Refit grinned up at him, nodding to the data pad the Prime still held. "We should know that by now, at the very least. It's just a precaution, not something I expect to be needed."

"I'm against just sending her out with only one fragging guard." Ratchet scowled at the mildly affronted expression of the SPARTAN-Bots' 2IC face plate as he crossed his arms over his chassis stubbornly. "No offence, Gale'. But attacking medics isn't something I'm putting past these slagging Decepticons."

Warcry grinned as he looked over the pad to the older medic. "Refit's not exactly innocent in the ways of combat either, Ratch'. I think your little protégé will be fine."

The yellow, irritable medic scowled even harder at the mention of the extra-curricular studies the SPARTANs had insisted on when the young femme had been learning a medic's trade, both before and after her stint in the Cybertronian Academy. He could understand some of it, as a combat medic Refit would be out on the front lines with the soldiers she had arrived on Cybertron with as soon as she completed her training under him, but he thought the infantry training they put her through was a bit overboard for any medic, combat orientated or not.

The tank handed the pad back to Galeforce, who took it and tucked it away in his subspace pocket. "I don't foresee any problems, as long as 'fit's done with you, Knight', and the trine."

"I am, sir." She chanced a glance at her mentor, wincing at the dark look on the older medic's face plate. "Ratchet, think of it like a field test. Sure it's a bit early, but besides calling in all of the deployed SPARTANs, what else could we do but let it happen on its own?"

The Head Medic of Iacon huffed, but let the issue slide and didn't complain anymore as the two of them left the unit's office. He did pin a dark glare on the tank himself before he left, much to Warcry's amusement.

Once they were alone Optimus handed the pad of the Tyger Pax report back to the CO of the SPARTAN-Bots, frowning. "How are they going to explain-"

"Trick' rigged it to look like an accident. The Enforcers got an anonymous call from him as well, which will lead them back to this Mirror bot and Shockwave."

"That almost seems too neat for what went on." Still with furrowed optic ridges, the Prime shook his helm again. "I don't mean to cast a bad light on your soldiers, Warcry, but how are you so calm about this?"

The tank thought about the question for a quiet breem, finally forced to shrug to the query. "I… well, like Gale' said. Not the weirdest slag I've heard yet. Besides, the Covert Ops are no strangers to ops like this. They're practically fragging pros at tying up loose ends when they try to trip others up."

"That… is not reassuring."

"Wasn't supposed to be."

\V/

Sandstorm followed Holdout to the very edge of Central City, still processing everything that the tracker had told him about her little sister's pending visit. "So, it's a medical checkup posing as maintenance… and it'll change your personality a bit?"

"No, 'storm. As we are now, we're prone to getting errors every now and again."

The bronze and black femme spoke to him over her shoulder joint, only half listening to him as she tracked the 2IC and medic through the uplink.

"It'll just… change a few things around. The only real major change in personality we've noted is with Shadowdancer, and that was conceivably because of the virus she was infected with before the reboot, or at least… that's the theory we're going with." She did turn her helm to grin at him briefly as they reached the meeting point she was to join up with her siblings per Warcry's orders. "And I'm not virus infected."

"Well, that's a good thing." The Wrecker mech allowed, casting a quick look over their surroundings simply out of habit. "What virus was she infected with?"

Holdout hesitated for a moment, not sure if she should answer that or not. Shadowdancer hadn't stated in so many words to keep quiet about the Decepticon crafted virus, but it was assumed by the rest of the SPARTANs not to go around telling bots about what it was. "It… well… I can't tell you about it, just that she had one."

Sandstorm blinked at her. It wasn't the first time she dodged a question or two with him, but usually he could at least understand the reason she gave behind her evasion. This was the first straight up refusal she had ever given him to something to do with what her unit knew. "Ah… well then, are we at risk for getting it?"

"No. We've got the anti-virus distributed with the last firewall boosters the Autobots sent out, so there are only a few bots we know of that have it. Some civilians, a few of our own, and a good section of the seeker frameset, but that's about it." Holdout shaded her optics, scanning the highway and spotting the spot of muted color she was certain was Refit and Galeforce. "If you're worried, you can have 'fit check you over for it, but I'm sure you don't have it."

"Anything else I should know?"

The tracker looked back at him briefly again, considering. "I may not be into work next cycle? 'fit's still gathering data about this for Knight' and Percy to look over, so she's slowing the process a bit for recording purposes."

\V/

Soundwave had added three more bots to her tentative list of Decepticons she could probably save. Since he now knew what she was looking for he had started screening the bots he came in contact with on a regular basis, Shadowdancer didn't ask him and he never volunteered how he was doing it, looking both for Shockwave's virus in question and the extent of damage done if it was loitering in another's processors.

In addition to Soundwave and his cassettes; she now had Blackout, who had clued in a long time ago to her being more than she appeared but he didn't really care enough on the hows and whys of it to report her; Barricade, who apparently had become somewhat soured on his absconding with half the military for Megatron given how they were being treated now; and maybe most if not all the seekers the Decepticon faction could claim, she wouldn't add them until they clearly committed themselves either way.

Orpheus had also submitted a list of bots that seemed more calm than most other Cons he worked with, something the tactician was taking with a good dose of skepticism. For all she knew, the assassin might be listing bots that may be more polite than he was on a regular basis and that would include probably half of the Decepticon Armada.

However, she now had a problem. Her rebels couldn't keep using her bar as a place to meet up, even if the noise and location were completely legit. It would become excessively noticeable if it was continually used, and the risk of being overheard by some Megatron loyalist was in the high digits.

It wasn't until Soundwave brought in Knock Out to talk to her that she started thinking of a new place to hold the meetings, the rather egotistical medic mech rambled on about everything when he was nervous and after her obligatory threat about betrayal and a small demonstration of what she could do to him if he torqued her off he definitely was that.

When he left she looked over to the cobalt mech still sitting in her office and asked about the medic's city of origin. "Tarn?"

"Tarn: Destroyed approximately near the end of Golden Age. Reason: Reactor explosion."

Shadowdancer's engine made a hum, as she thought about that. "Interesting. Care to take a trip with me?"

The communications officer raised an optic ridge at her, but he did get up when she did. Since the bar wasn't going to be opened for half an orn yet, and Silentforce was off at the Youth Sector with Kynaite, she had the time to spare. Zephyr was off dealing with a few stubborn energon dealers and Dreadnought wasn't in yet, so the Praxian locked up after Soundwave collected his cassettes and joined her outside of the converted warehouse.

"Now, which way are we taking out of the city?"

"City Gates: Regulated."

"Right, my way then." Shadowdancer took off towards the slums with a brief frown. "We need a bot on gate duty; I'm tired of sneaking out like some naughty youngling."

The Decepticon behind her wisely remained silent, curiously following her in order to see how it was she had gotten out of the city before. It remained to be seen if he would report it to Megatron, for it might be a major security issue if the femme was exploiting some hole in the defensive set up around the city.

He was confused when she stopped in the middle of the street they were on; looking around first to see if any bot was nearby to see what she was going to do. Once the femme was sure she could do whatever without being observed, she dropped to one knee joint and wedged her claws into the ground to pry up a plate of metal embedded in the road. It reluctantly moved with a groan of tortured metal, making the mech uncertain if he could do what she just did.

She set it aside, near enough that she wouldn't have to search for it once they were through, and motioned for him to go first.

He dropped into the dark recess in the street, and looking back up he saw Shadowdancer carefully maneuver to pull the plate of metal back in place before dropping the rest of the slight distance down. She flicked on her head lights, illuminating the ill-maintained underpass, and started off in another direction than they had come to reach the underground passage.

"Query: Location."

"The obviously badly maintained underground tunnels under Gygax. They run the width and breath of Cybertron, patrolled by the minibots and on occasion the mutants that live down here." Kicking at a large broken off piece of the carved rock walls, she glanced down a tunnel that intersected the one they were in to check for anything also using the underground levels of Cybertron. "I wouldn't wander around down here until you can get a rudimentary map of the place, it can get confusing with all the magnetic minerals down here. Not to mention the mutants are not the nicest things you will ever meet."

The two of them only saw a small group of bum bots just under the city's streets, when Shadowdancer spotted them she detoured down another tunnel and led them both to the level just under them, going back to the first sublevel after she judged them far enough past the bums to not be noticed.

Soundwave was trying to keep a rough route in his processor, but had to give it up as a bad job after a few silent breems of traveling. He was forced to conclude that the femme had better magnetic shielding than he had after the sixth time his map was scrambled by whatever vein of mineral they had passed.

Shadowdancer eventually led them to a sealed exit, or at least it looked so to the Decepticon mech. When she pushed with minimal effort on the metal and it simply fell away, opening the tunnel to the glow of the acid sea in the distance.

Soundwave followed her out, checking how far they were from the city's walls once he could see in that direction. To his surprise, they weren't that far at all, and he pinned a curious look on the Praxian's back plates as she set the metal plate back in place.

Knocking the rust off her claws, she caught his look when she turned around. "What?"

"Inquiry: Frequency of Encounters with patrols."

"Err… only once." She waved on clawed hand at him dismissively. "When I was out with Zephyr and Kynaite after his upgrade."

He regarded her with a less than impressed expression, and she huffed at him as she passed him to lead them both in the direction of the city that had been destroyed well before the outbreak of the civil war.

"It was completely her fault; you want to get irritated with some bot she's your femme."

Soundwave masterfully controlled his snort of disbelief, smirking safely behind his battle mask when he received a number of mimicking responses from his cassettes.

They made good time, even if Shadowdancer was a faster model than he was, and had a couple of joors to kill before the tactician needed to head back to the bar. They could see the ruins before reaching even the city's old limits, tucked between two outlaying cliffs. A crater marked the center like a target with a bull's eye, various rings of damage radiating outward to the crumbled remains of the walls that once surrounded the city.

The Praxian transformed back to root mode when they approached the spot where there used to be a rather ornate gate. "Damn."

After releasing his cassettes, the mech turned to look at her, where she stood admiring the damage that caused the city to practically collapse outward.

"I've seen entire worlds be destroyed before my optics. Some of which I was supposed to have saved, but each time it's always the fragging same." Shadowdancer pried a random piece of metal out of the ground, snickering with a twisted grin when she realized it was actually a bot's dismembered arm instead of part of the gates like she had thought. "Those were all glassed, though. Nothing left but a melted, smooth terrain if the attack succeeded. This… is more like something we would've done in a tight pinch."

Soundwave arched an optic ridge at her comment. Other than the first time she had mentioned her history in warfare to him in her office when she formally recruited him, and then pressed her energy blade to his throat cables, the Praxian had never spoken of what she was or had seen before returning to Cybertron to him since.

His curiosity, which had served him well when he was a scientific aide but not so well as a Decepticon officer, rose to the fore and he prodded her to continue as his cassettes started trying to find a safe path beyond the gates. "Request: Clarification."

"It's… almost too convenient. Megatron was first known from his gladiator fights in Tarn, and that he had the frame for a miner. What about before that? Was he always a miner, or is he even one? Which mine did he work in?"

She started following the cassettes as they poked around the first street they came across, evading the shifting rubble as they went.

"It's almost something I would've ordered be done if we were cleaning up something big, or trying to cover something up that most of the city knew but we didn't want spread around. Almost, because I don't think the loss of life that went on here would have been an acceptable price. "

Trailing after her, he was unsure what exactly she had come out here to look at, the cobalt mech kept silent, letting her think aloud even if she hadn't answered his prying into her past.

"I wonder where he started… it's not like even Megatron can rise from the depths of Cybertron fully upgraded-" She snatched up Frenzy, keeping the little cassette from stepping on something slightly out of place in the chaotic mess of the streets. "- and I would like to know who set out the mines. Call your cassettes back, Soundwave. I don't think we're alone here."

She let the small silver mech use her frame to reach the cobalt mech behind her, not even flinching when the cassette used her door-wings as a platform to jump to the Decepticon officer. She was more interested in inspecting the obviously constructed by an amateur mine and pressure plate Frenzy had nearly tripped.

Ravage refused to return; stubbornly sitting next to the femme's black pedes as she deftly disabled the explosive. "How good are you with explosives?"

"Probably better than any bot you've got back at base." Shadowdancer discarded the junk metal and kept the volatile ingredients for a moment, making note of them so she could ask Nitro later how much damage it would have done if set off. Finally scattering the components to keep them from going off by accident if the rubble shifted again, she looked back to the cassette. "I'm no where close to my brother in ability, but I've dealt with a lot of it in my function, and it's always nice to know how not to blow off your hands when working."

There was no indication of which way was trapped and which wasn't, so the SPARTAN took off in a random direction, wondering how many they had passed before she had snatched Frenzy away from one. It took her a while to locate another one, but this one had an adjacent mine rigged to go off if triggered.

It was slightly more difficult to disable, but not above her skills. "If you want to head back, I won't blame you. But I'm now curious."

"Odds: Better with more numbers."

"I highly doubt anything here can threaten me, but thanks. I think." She cast him an amused grin, taking off again in the same direction. It seemed like it was the right way.

It was fifty seven mines later, not all grouped together but some clusters spaced out to the point she almost considered calling up her frame brother for help, that they had any indication that whoever had trapped the rubble was still in the city. It was starting to get more organized, some of the buildings looked like some bot had cleared out the worst of the debris, and there were a few signs that the same bot had scraped their dark paint off on some of the rougher pieces of rubble.

Shadowdancer slowed down in dismantling the explosives, spending more time frozen still watching their surroundings.

Near the edge of what was supposed to be the Government district of Tarn, the bot in question rolled a rock down a pile of rubble at the mine the Praxian femme was finger joint deep in.

Soundwave grabbed a hold of her shoulder joint and pulled back roughly even as the femme kicked upward on a lip of pitted metal that once made up the street. The solid piece of steel that was propelled at one end to reach higher than their helms took the worst of the blast, shattering into decent sized chunks and raining down molten metal shards on the two of them.

The Decepticon was still reeling from the explosion, but his cassette, who had been on the other side of the street, and the SPARTAN both shot after the figure that had attempted to kill them.

Soundwave scrambled after them, catching up to his quadruped cassette but not the femme. Shadowdancer used the speed she had only shown him once before, catching up with the bot and tackling the four legged mech, taking them both rolling down another steep pile of rubble.

By the time the two Decepticons caught up with her, she had the black mech pinned to the remains of a wall, and he was nearly hissing at her in rage.

"Put me down, you Decepticon tool!"

The Praxian slammed him against the wall, nearly making the fragile rock crumble and knocking the looser pieces off.

"Do shut up. I belong to neither faction but my own." She glared with narrow gold optics until the mech seemed to control himself slightly, then carefully pulled him out of the crater she had made with his frame. "Now then, who the frag are you?"

With less rock covering the mech from his sight, the communication's officer could see the mech was built much like Ravage, but not as sleek. He once had a similar paint job, but much of it had been scrapped away or rusted through at spots. Except for a massive gash in his armor plating near the neck cables' base, the mech was mostly undamaged under the plating.

"My designation is Nightstalker, femme." The mech squirmed, trying to get out of the clawed grasp that had him by the neck cables. "Now put me down already."

"You tried to kill me, so no." Inspecting the mech from helm to all four pedes, she noted the wear and damages to the mech, the oldest of which seemed like battle damage. "You must have been here since the city blew up, what do you know of it?"

Nightstalker stopped moving, peering at the femme with hard red optics. "Why the frag should I tell you that? You can ask that slagging backstabber behind you."

Both Shadowdancer and Soundwave turned to Ravage, who just gave the both of them a confused shrug.

The Praxian looked to the mech with her. "How did you get Ravage as a cassette?"

"Short Answer: Lord Megatron. Unit Ravage: Critical condition at time of reformat."

"Reformat? Ha… fragger deserved it and whatever else he got." The scratched up quadruped mech spat as his paw like pedes scrabbled for a better hold on the femme's forearms. "He and that Megatron mech left me and the Overlord to die just outside of the city, just before Tarn blew. We'd been caught by some of the slagging rebelling forces, and one of them cut though most of my systems with a fragging gladiator's ax."

"…so you know of Megatron? Interesting." She suddenly dropped Nightstalker, taking all three mechs by surprise. Turning to Soundwave, she crossed her arms over her chassis. "Who's the Overlord?"

The communications officer blinked, taken aback by the question. "Overlords: Main ruling members of the High Council. Last Overlord: Reported deactivated from overstressed circuits."

"That's actually possible?" Shadowdancer tilted her helm to the side as she filed that random fact away, shaking her helm as she looked back to the nearly pitiable mech still sitting at her pedes. "You have a choice, Nightstalker. You can come with me and work to take Megatron down… or you can stay here. I have no idea how you managed to survive this long, but you'll have better odds in getting revenge with me."

"And why the frag should I trust you, femme?"

"My designation is Shadowdancer, and how many others have you seen looking into Megatron's past? Where else do you think you can get a bot like me?" The Praxian gave him a wickedly edged grin, leaning down to look him square in the optics. "I and my unit are rather unique. But I don't need you to do what I'm going to do, although the information would be nice. So pick quickly, mech. I don't have all cycle to wait on you."

She turned on a pede, obviously a military move in its execution, and walked away. Soundwave gave the quadruped mech one last look before following with Ravage, who ignored the other mech as some bot of little importance to him.

She hadn't gotten far away from the spot she pinned him to the wall, picking her way with care to evade any more mines, before the mech came running up as fast as he could with a rather serious limp. "Are you sure you can do what you're talking about?"

"He won't be the first dictator I've ever toppled. I have an unfortunate amount of experience in this." Glancing back at Nightstalker, she gestured to Ravage. "Just don't attack the other cyber-kitty. I kinda like him."

The mech glared at the cassette briefly, but nodded his acceptance to her request and started following along. "What are you looking for? Most of Tarn is just a junk heap now."

"The remains of the Hall of Records. There should be some servers sunk deep enough underground to protect them from even a blast of this size. From what old maps I can get off Clearsight, it should be around… ah."

Interestingly enough, the plaque that stated what the building was used for was intact, but the building wasn't. It had been sheltered with the bulk of the buildings around it, having been at one time standing shorter than them, but it still had collapsed in on itself.

"Now what?"

"I'd suggest you three back up." Ravage and Soundwave instantly retreated at the Praxian's words, Nightstalker following after a dubious moment. Shadowdancer turned back to the building, and punched the ground before her pedes.

The ground under her collapsed and a mix of dust, rust, and sand flew up in response to the violently shifting rock. Both cat like mechs stalked to the very edge of the crater, looking down at the still agitated depths.

As they waited to see what they could, there rose up a series of sounds that let them know the femme was still functional. The scrape of rock being pushed, a few thuds of heavy material hitting the ground, and finally the tearing screech of metal being ripped.

It was a few more moments before the Praxian reappeared, easily leaping up the rocky edges of the crater she had made back up to the street's main level. Stopping only to pat the cassette on the helm, the femme walked over to the mech she had brought with her. "How good are you at repairing damaged circuitry and crystal data chips? I really don't want to send this all to Spotter, because that would force me to either send out Silentforce or recall Trickflip again."

She handed him a collection of damaged components, most of which were heat warped if not cracked and rust encrusted.

"Estimation of repairable items: Unknown."

"Eh… well, try. We can send the worst ones off later on." Shadowdancer pried out a few chips of rock and loose metal out of her claws, idly looking over the new mech. "We're driving back to Gygax, how do you want to do this?"

Nightstalker flicked a glance from the cassette, the mono-toned mech, the crater behind him, and back to the femme. "With you."

"Alright then, let's get the frag out of here."

\V/

Silentforce wasn't exactly worried when he returned with Kynaite from the Youth Sector and the boss femme wasn't in.

Shadowdancer occasionally had to meet with different bots about her bar and property owning, so it wasn't unusual for her to meet with them on short notice. It was only when both Zephyr and Blackout were looking for the Praxian and came to him to see if he knew where she was that he started to get a bad feeling in his spark that she was up to no good.

He hadn't really had to deal with Shadowdancer's more risky schemes yet. the Praxian had known just how far she was to toeing the line out here and had toned down more of her usual dicey maneuvers in deference to her adopted youngling's continued safety and the aspect of secrecy she needed for her plan to work to any degree.

However, there had been some of the more wild rumors about the tactician back in the Milky Way that had warned him that she could get borderline ludicrous with how she completed her missions. The very reason she had been on Reach in time to be placed on the _ATHENS_ was because of one such mission that was completed, but at a steep price to the femme in question.

With the Autobot's gag order on their unit starting to unravel, Shadowdancer was running out of time out here for her personal mission. It really was only a matter of time until something about the SPARTANs was posted to the information nets that kept all of Cybertron alerted to the events that happened on the planet, and the Autobots would be forced to admit they knew about them and even had a number on staff.

There was no telling how Megatron would react to that, if he would continue to ignore her or send some bots to try and take her out of the war before she could pick the 'wrong' side.

Admittedly, he was in Gygax to prevent the worst case scenario for her youngling by her orders, but he had some from Warcry to keep the tactician alive at any cost. With her recruitment of Decepticons starting up and gaining speed, it really was just a race to see what exploded in their faceplates first.

Silentforce wasn't really surprised, more like resigned, when the SPARTAN femme finally showed up to the bar with an unknown tagalong. The four legged mech was a mess of dented and rusting armor plates and had a wicked gash just before his forward left shoulder joint and his neck cables, and he looked like he was glaring at him. The bodyguard specialist narrowed his own gold optics back, even as Shadowdancer rolled hers at him.

"Silentforce, this is Nightstalker. Night', this is 'force, my brother. Behave the both of you." She took a few steps into the bar, paused, and looked back to the hip joint high mech. "How do you want to be repaired? I know a Decepticon medic, but I wouldn't trust him with a screwdriver near me at the moment."

The ex-bodyguard narrowed his optics on the other even as he answered. "I'd rather not be seen by any fragging Con. Next option."

"The only medic I know of that doesn't belong to any faction yet is Refit, and it'll be a while until she's in range for us to go see." When Nightstalker didn't even dignify that with a response, the Praxian turned around to look at him squarely. "Then the only other option you have at the moment is my youngling, but he's better with hardware than soft."

That statement made the quadruped mech look up at her. " _Your_ youngling?"

"Tash-shia!" The cry made all three bots standing near the entrance look to the staircase at the back of the converted warehouse, where a small silver and blue blur was racing to them. Kynaite crashed into his carrier's shins and grinned up at her. "Fun-n orn. St-stay?"

"Yes, I'm staying for the cycle. 'naite, this is Nightstalker. Do you think you can fix his injury here? He doesn't like medics."

The youngling, who had only clued in that the mech standing near Silentforce wasn't Ravage at his carrier's words, obediently trotted over and took a look. "Tem-m-p?"

"That's right, just for now. Until Refit gets close enough to go see."

Since it seemed like the Praxian could understand the young mech with cold finger joints in his old injury without translations like he needed, the ex-bodyguard held still.

Kynaite finally nodded firmly to Shadowdancer. "Yes-s-s. T-temp."

"Take it upstairs, then. You can use my office for it."


	29. Chapter 29

Starting at the loud sound of a data pad being tossed to land on his desk, Titan looked up from writing up his last incident report to the thrower and winced internally when his Station Chief glared at him. "You adopted a youngling. Why the frag did you do that?"

"… I… uh, wanted to?"

The older mech glowered at the obviously evasive answer. Since it was already done he had no place to either complain or object to one of his better SWAT team members adopting some scrap of metal, but he wondered how the younger mech had gotten it approved so fast and without the normal cycles of having his work and home investigated.

He pointed to the pad he had thrown to get the white and black SWAT Enforcer's attention. "The next station over have overtaxed their regular duty Enforcers, and have sent on an investigation they need some help with to me. Since you now have a bitlit to go home to, you can take it."

The SPARTAN blew out a weary sigh and picked up the pad as the Station Chief walked away from his desk, wryly thinking that the XO had warned him there may be more consequences to his actions in taking on Bumblebee than he had planned on.

Reading the investigation request, he took note of the address it gave and suppressed a groan. It was the same one that Sideswipe had told him the two Covert Ops bots had visited for the Mirror bot. Internally cursing out karma and the ways the universe worked, Titan got up, hoping that whatever forensic team he was assigned would be either inept or uncaring how suspicious the sight was.

Then again, given how queasy the silver swordmech had looked when he and Trickflip had visited, the forensic team might be too sickened by the underground room to want to linger on anything suspicious.

(ooo000ooo)

Unfortunately, he had drawn a team of forensic bots that were rather professional in their approach.

Besides a few exclamations of disgust at the wall of horror, they had gotten to work rather efficiently processing the data available at the scene. The lead forensic bot, who was a mech by the designation of Griz, stood next to him and took all the data that his team had found and compiled it. Titan figured he was just there to look intimidating for all the loitering bots trying to see what was going on.

One of the other mechs, one by the name of Wraith if the SPARTAN could recall the rushed introductions right, called both of them over to the frame of the Mirror bot. "Griz? This doesn't look right…"

Since he had been told to keep the forensic team from trouble, Titan wandered over close enough to hear what the dark mech had found.

"The serial numbers don't match this frame. They're compatible, but the manufactory list has this part going to a mech by the designation Keystone, and this part here is for an Inkblot mech that's listed as deactivated." Wraith then turned and pointed to the parts on the walls. "Those all come from other bots as well, one listed as a femme by the name Everclear, and on. They all come from other bots that are either deactivated or have been reported missing for the last few cycles."

Griz examined the wall of parts for a moment, noting just how many there were displayed in all of its grisly glory, then signaled for one of his femmes and the Enforcer to come closer. "Check out these missing bots that seem to be missing parts. See if you can find anything about his or her mannerisms that have changed either rapidly or slowly over the last few vorns. Jadelight, I don't think our borrowed Enforcer knows the investigation procedures, so you'll have to take the lead on that."

"Not a fragging clue in the Pit." Titan swept the multi green shaded femme a short bow, indicating the door with his other hand. "I figured I was just here to keep you all out of trouble."

The femme grinned at him. "The lack of looming about, scowling on a general purpose at every bot, and disagreeing with everything we say is refreshing, I must say."

"Isn't that counterproductive?"

Jadelight turned back to Griz before she reached the door of the underground room. "Can we keep this one?"

Titan looked between the widely grinning femme and the amused smirk the lead forensic mech was wearing, wondering if he had just done something wrong.

\V/

Ratchet blinked blankly at the data pad Optimus Prime had just given him and looked up to glare at the Commander of the Autobots' forces. "You have _got_ to be slagging kidding me."

"I do not believe so." Optimus leaned back in his chair, calmly gazing back at the medic. "Xenon is retiring from active duty, and we need a competent medic as the CMO to replace him. The only bot I can think of to take over for him is you. Or are you refusing?"

The Prime had called Ratchet into his office, not an entirely unusual occurrence as the red and blue mech preferred getting personal reports from every section of the base, and handed the yellow medic the orders that would basically switch Xenon and Ratchet's positions.

"Of course I'm not fragging refusing, but I'm a pacifist, I don't fight." The medic scanned the data on the pad again, scowling at the parts that would draft him into whatever fight the Prime got in. "That Pit-spawned Hoist has more slagging combat experience than I do, even if he's slated with the construction and repair division and not with me at the moment. Why not promote him?"

"Because I feel that we need a pacifist in the command structure. Prowl is good, but a peaceful solution is not the first plan his CPU goes to when under attack."

Ratchet blinked up at the larger mech, shot a dark glare at the silently snickering black mech behind the Prime, and got up with the pad clenched in one fist. "Fine. But I am implementing some slagging changes to the established protocols. Especially those Pit-be-damned SPARTANs. I'm not going to let them fragging slide anymore without a full medical checkup, and not the simple repairs they keep getting by with."

Optimus blinked back, smirk safely hidden behind his battle mask. "Understood. Would you like to inform Warcry, or should I?"

"I'll fragging do it." The medic stomped out of the Prime's office, intending to head straight to the SPARTAN-Bots' unit office and coral the mech before the tank could wiggle out of anything, or alert the seeker contingent of what he intended before he cornered them later on.

Ironhide unmuted his vocalizer and laughed loudly, even Optimus had to give a few snickers over what he had just unleashed on the ex-alien contingent of Autobots and Neutrals.

(ooo000ooo)

Warcry looked up in alarm as Ratchet kicked his opened office door and glared at him. "Err… yes?"

He was sure he hadn't done anything yet to earn the medic's ire, other than send Refit out to deal with the other SPARTANs against his recommendations.

"Come with me."

Short and to the point, and without the normal vitriol that normally laced the mech's speech patterns, the tank rose up and followed as Ratchet turned around and headed off farther into the more populated parts of the base.

Warcry was desperately searching his processors for whatever had the medic's wires in a knot as they walked, the yellow mech was mildly bemused that it hadn't taken a few good threats to get the tank to follow him.

Ratchet wordlessly led the SPARTAN through the med bay and straight to the medic's office in the back, giving a short glare to innocently smirking Xenon pretending to work on the data work that was now the younger mech's responsibility. "As I'm sure you somehow already fragging knew I'm the new CMO of the Autobots."

"Err… yes?"

"Xen's been letting you all skate by without a full slagging medical checkup, and guess what I'm not going to let you all do from this point on?"

Warcry blinked, looking between the medics in the office. One was still smirking and trying to hide said smirk badly behind a data pad, and the other was grinning evilly. "Ah… well. Frag. Now?"

"Yes, fragging now. So you can't forewarn that trio of fly bots before I can get my hands on them." Ratchet pointed in the direction of the separate repair recovery room, the attached small areas behind the main repair bay used for more complicated surgeries and reconstruction. "Get."

The tank held up his hands, placed them behind his helm, and marched like a prisoner of war to where the Autobots' new CMO was pointing to.

Xenon broke down laughing at Ratchet's exasperated groan. "You do realize if you do this, they're not going to let you live it down, right?"

The younger CMO gave the older mech a dirty look, accompanied by the SPARTANs' one finger salute on his way out after the tank.

\V/

Rook seemed more than a little distracted the next off-cycle that all of her 'aware of her prior history as an alien' bots could get off together.

Both Smokescreen and Blaster had their patrols doubled on them, following an Autobot issued warning that both Praxus and Simfur were the most at risk of being the next city targeted by the Decepticons, and had very little personal time to themselves after the reports had time to circulate around from the Enforcers to the Government workers and on down until even the bum bots that the saboteur taught spent some time gossiping about it to her.

The general feeling of panic in the city was only recently starting to die down, as more time passed it became apparent that all the pessimistic bots had understated the amount of time the city had until its doom, and the more level processored of the city's inhabitants started taking what the more panicky bots stated with skepticism.

Since she had been such a huge help in figuring out the mood of the city through the various classes she taught her distraction was more than a little alarming to the two Enforcers, but neither wanted to draw the merchant's attention to it in case it would be something that would alarm the younger Praxian.

That intent was rendered moot when Bluestreak finally got annoyed with the SPARTAN's inattention to his story and demanded to know what was wrong.

Rook blinked at him first, then cast some amused glances to the two police bots she was sharing a bar table with. "Is it just me, or am I being followed?"

"What?" Smokescreen's door-wings jerked upward, but the Enforcer didn't react visibly in any other way. He blinked back at her, frowning thoughtfully as the sensors attached to his sensitive panels picked up what information it could about the other patrons of their habitual bar. "Which one are you thinking of?"

"There are three of them, Smokey." Tilting her helm to indicate the booth in the far back of the establishment, the gray femme tapped her fingers on the table. "Two mechs and a femme. I think they've been tailing me for the last megacycle, but I can't be sure without checking them out in a way I'm thinking you two will object to, and I'm sure Blue here would protest against."

The merchant didn't rise to the bait, merely giving his 'sensei' a level look from across the table. "Then why bring it up if you know we wouldn't like it?"

"Force of habit." She smirked at the younger Praxian's optic roll at her, casting a side long glance to the communications expert next to her. "What do you think?"

"They could be targeting you from how many times they've looked this way, but I can't pull any records on the bots from the Enforcers' servers." Blaster thoughtfully took a sip of his cube to buy himself more time to think, finally giving the femme a neutral shrug. "I've got nothing other than Eject can confirm that it's you that they've been looking over in this direction for in the last few breems, ever since they wandered in not too long after you did."

The diversionary tactician scowled down at the table, door-wings still twitching in his paranoia. "So what are they? Simple lookers that found the wrong bot to follow, or something else?"

"I'm going to go with something else." Rook leaned forward, so that if the bots watching her looked over they would think she was sharing something that would tend to be amusing, and lowered her vocalizer so only the three other bots at the table would hear her. "I know that there is a bounty on my helm, they might be either mercenaries looking to collect or friends of a bot I've torqued off recently."

Bluestreak jerked backwards, horrified.

"A-!" He gulped and forcibly lowered the tone of his vocalizer before he attracted the wrong kind of attention to their discussion. "A _what_? Rook, when did that happen?"

"Calm down, Blue." Still grinning, the saboteur patted the younger mech on the shoulder joint. "I've done a lot that might irritate some highly placed bots, even with less than two vorns to work with on Cybertron. It really was only a matter of time until some bot wanted me and some of my other cohort siblings dead and offered a lot of credits to see it done. They might not be mercs after my helm if Blast can't get records, which should mean their either professionals with a highly placed patron or newbies to the work. That might mean they're either after my deactivation or simply information, or from what I know…"

She trailed off weakly; realizing that bit of information might not reassure the merchant.

"But really, Blue. I'm a SPARTAN, I can take care of myself."

"Smooth recovery, Rook." Smirking over at the rather sheepish looking femme sitting at the table, Blaster tilted his helm to the side, pursing his lip plates for a moment as she clumsily tried to get herself out of the hole she had dug with her own words. "I've got a suggestion."

That effectively put an end to the merchant's low rant to the SPARTAN about how not to reassure others. All three of the large framed Cybertronians looked over to him with various levels of wariness as the four cassettes started snickering.

Smokescreen was the one to ask the question on the other's processors, having a long association with the other mech to draw on in being slightly numb to his fits of rather absurd practicality in the face of issues in their line of work. "Are we going to regret asking what?"

The communications expert turned to the saboteur to face her fully. "What would you do to see if they really are following you?"

"Change up my schedule for an obvious reason, something that wouldn't initially seem suspicious." Rook raised an optic ridge at the line of questioning, but gamely continued anyways. "Then double back if they are still following me and ambush them to see what exactly they wanted."

"Well… okay. If you were in the middle of a combat zone _that_ would work…" He set his elbow joints on the table and grinned at her confused expression. "But we're in a city. Even better, we're in a city where attacking and or damaging bots simply because they're acting suspicious is considered wrong. Very wrong. Try again."

Still confused, she rethought her plan and gave the other mech the point. That would get her in trouble, since it had gotten Holdout in trouble a vorn ago. "Um… change my orn to orn schedule slightly, see if they are still following me, and then report it to my nearest Enforcer?"

"That's the response you think we expect." Blaster pointed out blandly, still wearing an infuriating smirk. "I've got a better idea, one that won't get you in trouble with either our superiors or yours."

"Spit it out already, Blast." Smokescreen chucked a credit chit at his patrol partner, mildly irritated at the roundabout turn the conversation took. "And if it's even a little embarrassing, I'm going to off-line you and toss your frame in the nearest ditch."

The orange and black mech just let the credit bounce off his helm, his smirk taking a wicked edge. "Take her home."

Bluestreak collapsed in a giggling pile of metal at the rather scandalized expression that his brother gave the other Enforcer for his suggestion.

Rook just looked between them all, feeling she had missed something important. "What?"

Laughing harder, the merchant could only shake his helm at her. Blaster turned to her and calmly stated. "Go home with Smokey for a few cycles. See if they continue to follow, so we know if they are after you or just share the same routes. Blue can crash with me, won't be the first time ever."

Smokescreen groaned and let his helm fall into his hands even as the SPARTAN's optics lit up with understanding. "You know… I actually think that is a good idea."

"What?"

She waved a hand dismissively at him. "If I can't do what I would normally do, then that just leaves Intel gathering and you supposedly know how that one works, right?"

Rook poked a few buttons on the service drone that had been supplying the eight of them with their energon that off-cycle.

"But what about-"

"If you don't think your reputation would survive, you can do what you want and I'll go with Blaster." Shoving herself up from the table, the saboteur grinned wickedly at him as she turned to leave. "But I'm a big femme. I think I can handle recharging on a couch or something. Won't be the worst thing I've ever rested on."

Smokescreen shot the still smirking Blaster a glare as he shot off after her. The communications expert simply waved goodbye as the two of them left the bar.

"Cheater. The bet was if he ever got up the courage to ask her, not if you did it for him." Bluestreak checked the service drone as he spoke, frowning as he noted that the femme had paid for their fuel in full. "It was your turn to pay, right?"

"I'm not cheating, just assisting. There was nothing in the rules about that. And uh… yeah. Why, did she pay it again?"

Steeljaw looked over to Eject under the table. "How much do you want to bet that Smokey's going to hit the roof when he figures out he's corrupted his partner and his brother into betting about his love life?"

The other cassette just rolled his optics at the question. "If that mech hasn't clued in already, he's a really bad tactician."

"Did you know those bots are following after Rook and Smokey?" Rewind asked the both of them almost conversationally as he and Ramhorn collected the cubes the cassettes had been using to return to the service drone.

Bluestreak overheard them and looked over to Blaster, alarmed. The other Enforcer caught the look and shrugged. "With both your brother and a SPARTAN aware of that possibility, Blue, I think they'll be fine."

Eject handed up the cubes he took from Ramhorn's back to the communications expert. "Better tell them anyways."

(ooo000ooo)

Not even two steps out of the bar they had gone to catch up in, Rook turned to Smokescreen and asked in a deceptively calm tone, "You do realize they've got a bet going, right?"

"Of course." The Enforcer rolled his optics at the, to him, inane question. "I even know how much the pot has reached, and every bot that contributed to it."

"Really? Huh."

"What?"

"That's better than what I've got. I've only got the bots, not the amounts they've anted up for it." She whistled for a moment, an odd, seven tone series of notes, causing the mech she was walking with to look over curiously. "Some of my paying students are in the area; I'm just having them watch our back plates until we get to your home."

Smokescreen shrugged off the femme's warning system, noting the series of notes for future reference, and continuing the conversation. "You do realize that even you're XO-"

"Put down a few credits when she heard about it, yeah. Bit surprising coming out of that femme, she didn't approve of gambling before we got here, but something must have loosened her stance on it since she's been in Gygax." The SPARTAN saboteur smirked suddenly. "I wonder how long it's going to take the others to catch on that she doesn't care anymore?"

"…bet you fifty that it's one of the mechs screwing up and betting in front of her that does it."

"Oh, you're so on. I see you're fifty on the mechs, and raise you a hundred that it'll be Knight'. She's got a thing for poker."

Shaking his helm, the Praxian mech unlocked his front door for the both of them. "I'll match your hundred, fifty on Orpheus trying to get a rise out of her."

"Ooh, that's right." Rook snickered a bit as she took a seat on the couch in the main area of the Praxian brother's home unit. "But Orph' won't tell any of the others if he figures it out. How would we know?"

"I've… got my ways." He spoke over his door-wings as he logged on the Enforcer's servers to check that he didn't have an incident response request waiting for him. "Blast just commed."

"They're following?"

Smokescreen switched the vid screen from his inbox to the security systems he had installed in the living unit when Prowl left. "He said they were heading this way… but they're not on the screen. Either they're not here, or are they're smart enough not to trip any sensors."

Getting up, the saboteur wandered over to see what the mech was looking at, ignoring his sudden frown as his door-wings picked up the increased vibrations from her nearly silently operating frame. "That doesn't really mean much. They could just be outside the senor array you have… frag it all mech, I could do it with what you've got here."

"…really?" The Enforcer blinked when the femme simply pointed a few weak spots on his security system, scowling as he realized there were a few blind spots when it came to war purpose bots and their unique set of skills, or just ex-thieves and other unsavory sorts. "Damn… you ever think of becoming a security specialist for us? I think it would pay more than what you're doing now."

Rook's lip plates curled up in a smirk.

"Maybe later. There is a reason I've been doing what I've been doing." She patted him on the shoulder joint and walked back over to her temporary recharge berth for the next few cycles. "So… how long until I can beat the slag out of them?"

Smokescreen rolled his optics at her as he armed the alarm and shut down the computer. "We're doing this the right way, Rook. You can't beat them up unless they trespass."

"Duly noted."

He glared at her innocent smirk as she stretched out on the couch. "Behave, and maybe you won't be recharging here for long."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

He opened his mouth components, froze as the meaning behind her words registered, and scowled at her. "I'm going to recharge now, you do… whatever it is femmes do."

He masterfully ignored her laughing at him as he left the room.

\V/

Titan let himself and Jadelight into the office of the lead forensic bot, giving a salute to Griz who looked up from talking with Wraith about the processed information they took from Mirror's little workshop of horrors.

"Sir, we've got the information you requested. As it turns out, Everclear didn't show up for her work shift two cycles ago and most of the bots you passed the designations on to me all didn't report in this cycle. Keystone did put a report in last cycle, but the fore bot for the construction company couldn't get a hold of him." She also pulled a data pad out of her subspace and handed it over, taking a seat next to the dark mech she worked with as the SPARTAN chose to lean against the wall. "I've also got the more noticeable changes to the bots' in question personality and opinions, noted around when their coworkers saw the change."

The mech frowned thoughtfully at the information, looking up at the white and black mech taking up space in the back of his office almost as if his inclusion was an afterthought. "Anything else to add, Titan?"

To the three bots' surprise, he nodded. "I've asked around, both in the Enforcers I know and my cohort siblings in other cities, and apparently that Keystone mech once worked in Kaon before the Decepticons attacked it. One of the bots you're missing the designation of I got out of my brother who once lived in the city, Ice, was a custom armor painter. He, Keystone, and Inkblot are bots that were confirmed killed when that city fell. I think this Mirror bot was in that city before coming here; because that was the only way he could have gotten a hold of those parts."

Griz blinked blankly at the SPARTAN, mentally adding that to the information already known to them. "Now, I really want to keep you here."

"See? Helpful and effective. I vote we keep him." Jadelight beamed up at the head forensic bot, nearly bouncing in her chair. "Can we?"

Griz grinned back. "Maybe, if he and his Station Chief don't object. Anything else out of that brother of yours about this Ice mech?"

"Silentforce never got repainted in that city, but I'm waiting for him to get back to me after talking to his old coworkers as one of them might have. He did know a Keystone, not very well but he did work at the same construction site he did for a few cycles, and the bot he told me about sounded different than the bot we went to go see the construction workers about." Titan looked between the bots he was in the office with warily. "Whatever you do, please don't torque off my Station Chief. He's already annoyed with me."

"Perfect, I'll put in the personnel change request." Wraith got up and clapped the SPARTAN on the shoulder joint as he passed him to leave. "Hope you like it here."

\V/

Refit started the reboot on Holdout, noting that both the recording device and her own sensors were recording the changes between the tracker's processor now and before.

When the other SPARTAN femme's orange optics flickered online again, the little medic checked to ensure that all of the changes that had happened to the trine and the rest of the SPARTANs already rebooted had happened. She frowned slightly, as the primary processing language changed from Holdout's native German laced Cybertronian to a Cybertronian version laced with German.

Worrying her lower lip plate with her upper dental plate, Refit wondered if that meant the rebooted SPARTANs would now be more vulnerable to viruses. It hadn't really been a problem before, as the differences in programming kept most of the SPARTANs, except for Shadowdancer, free of anything major affecting their processors. That was something she had already spoken to Spotter about, but it didn't stop her from becoming distressed about it.

Holdout groaned, raising a hand to filter the light from her optics that Refit had trained on her. "Is it supposed to feel like I got a bit too overcharged last cycle?"

"Shadow' reported that hers was painful when she came online again, but that hasn't been a problem with any of the others yet." Carefully overlooking the now list length of changes to the tracker's programming, the medic picked through it to see if there was a reason. "You look fine… other than you were processing in more Cybertronian before the reboot than any of the others so far… oh."

Refit snickered and flicked a few things on the equipment she had brought with her to Central.

"Anti-virus firewalls got turned off. One moment please."

Wincing as the program started up with a painful kick to her CPU, the tracker hoisted herself up and carefully maneuvered her frame to an upright position, ensuring that the devices the medic had brought with her were still attached in her new position.

"I'll write you up a medic's file to not work for the rest of the cycle, if you want." Refit grinned at the irritated look the bronze and black femme gave her for that joke, starting to unhook the still sitting femme. "So other than the sore sensation in your processors, how are you feeling?"

"Fine." Holdout shot at the medic as she got up to start physically checking her systems out, something every SPARTAN seemed to do before starting their cycles.

Refit watched it go on silently as she collected her equipment and returned it to her rather large subspace pocket. It was one of the few reasons why she never worried that her soldiers were going to overdo something in the cities they lived in.

They were nothing but diligent about ensuring everything worked correctly, or at least enough for what they needed, before starting their normal cycles. Something she was sure would make any malfunctions apparent before any maintenance check could be conducted.

When the tracker was done with her normal routine, she checked over the less than obvious changes the SPARTANs had compared to Cybertronians. Once that was completed to her satisfaction, the bronze and black femme saluted the little medic and left her berth room to reassure her intended that she was fine.

Galeforce looked up from her couch; he and Sandstorm had been playing Go Fish with the tracker's handmade deck of cards, and peered over to the former AI as the tracker distracted his playing partner. "Where to next? Praxus, Simfur, or Polyhex?"

Refit shook her helm. "The Covert Ops bots in Decepticon cities are going to gather for me elsewhere, someplace Shadowdancer said would be suitable for me. She doesn't want me going close to any base or city held by the Cons without some serious backup."

The 2IC hefted a sigh, and amended his question. "Then Nitro or Rook, 'fit. If we go to Praxus, then we would have to cross the Magnesium Mountain Range to get to Yuss and Quickgrip. But if we go to Simfur, we can go up to Tyger Pax and Crystal City first or down to Yuss, back up, then cross the mountains."

"We are going to have to cross them anyways, right? Quickgrip should be rather familiar with them, so I think we should go up to Tyger Pax first and work our way down from that side of the range."

"Blurr should be able to help." Holdout tossed to them as she and Sandstorm prepared to go back to work. "Quick's little sort of Neutral Autobot? He's been there longer than our brother has, let him know that you want to cross the mountains near Yuss and let the two of them plot out how you're going to do it."

\V/

{ _What the frag did you do?_ }

Shadowdancer blinked, cutting herself off from speaking to Nightstalker about his time in Tarn before the reactors blew the city up. { _One-one-three? Whatever could you be referring to?_ }

She felt a massive wave of annoyance filter through the firewalls between her and the SPARTAN trine leader, and simply had to smirk at him from several cities away, even if it did gain her some confused looks from the quadruped mech and Soundwave sitting in her office.

{ _I threatened them... I think. Unless you and your seeker types have some other meaning behind bopping three on the helm and a civil conversation with another something else._ }

{ _He sent one of the trines he controls here, you slagging femme, to demand a neutral meeting somewhere not Decepticon controlled. For him to do that, give up even a little of the force he has at any given time, means Starscream is seriously thinking about you and what you're doing. Whatever you're doing, I hope you're stepping lightly._ }

Her engine hummed as she considered that. She still didn't trust the seekers that the Decepticon Aero Division Leader was sending her, but had made use of their skills in seemingly harmless ways. After all, what would seekers do with the traffic patterns between Gygax and the ruins of Tarn? { _Need me to broker your end of the deal here?_ }

{ _What- never mind. Yeah, sure. Do you know of somewhere around where you are that we can all meet up?_ }

{ _Ironically enough, yes. Someplace the seekers have been watching for me._ } Shadowdancer dug through her desk and found the data pad she kept any information about the long destroyed city on. { _Do you know of Tarn?_ }

She knew it was a negative even before the SPARTAN mech got back to her. { _Zero-seven-zero said he can get us there. He'll need the coordinates. Now, why are you interested in it?_ }

{ _Reasons._ }

{ _…you know, I can't wait until you explain, in detail, what you've been doing down there to Warcry. I'll be sure to get a front row seat._ }

{ _I can't wait to see you greet the seekers here. Does that make us even?_ } The SPARTAN-Bots' XO shook her helm fondly even as the connection to the seeker mech cut off. "Well, that was interesting."

"What is it?" Nightstalker, who had claimed a seat on the couch as her youngling carefully repaired what he could, asked of her before she could continue their previous conversation. He had figured out rather quickly to ask his questions before she could get on another topic or he would never get a straight answer out of her.

The Praxian sank back in her office chair; claws laced together and elbow joints resting on her desk. "Just had a quick chat with my brother. Something is up on the seeker front, but if it's good news for us remains to be seen. Now then, as you were saying?"

The black and silver quadruped cautiously continued from where he had left off once the femme's optics had suddenly grew dim. "…Megatron was known at the beginning of his gladiator career as 'Megatronus'. It was shortened to the form you're familiar with because it was easier for the spectators to chant when he was fighting in the arenas."

"…that sounds vaguely familiar." Shadowdancer let her claws untangle and rummaged through her desk again, selecting a battered data pad this time to look at. "Megatronus, Megatronus… _Megatronus_ Prime?"

Nightstalker sat up sharply, making Kynaite squeal in protest as the parts he had been fixing were moved without his permission. "Are you saying Megatron is a _Prime_?"

"Oh frag no. Megatron is nothing Prime like. I've met two of them, you know, even if one was less than optimal Prime material." The SPARTAN snorted at the idea and waved her pad at him. "Megatronus Prime was one of the Seven _original_ Primes. He was the naughty one that bots had memory wiped the name from their processors when he caused the deaths of the other six."

The mech on her couch furrowed his optic ridges at her as he slowly lowered himself for her youngling to continue what repairs he could. "…how old _are_ you? You know of a slagging designation nearly lost to time, but didn't know what an Overlord was?"

"Sixty four… five… whatever, vorns. I'm not the bot that keeps track of that." Returning her personal pad to her desk, the femme shrugged. "Most of that was spent off of Cybertron, so you'll have to forgive the moments of incomprehension. And that designation isn't as forgotten as you think. Clearsight, one of my sisters, found it in Ankmoor's Hall of Records."

"So you're an Ancient like me." At her uncomprehending look, tinted with annoyance, the mech smirked at her. "Bots that reach over fifty vorns of function and aren't insane or completely tired of functioning at all are called Ancients. You supposedly know so much that you're walking examples of the best Cybertron has, and the rest of us are supposed to follow."

"I highly doubt I qualify for that." From the way Soundwave was suddenly intently studying her, she supposed she should pass that on to the scout to see what she could dig up about it. "But why Megatronus? That far back, the name of the seventh Prime wouldn't be as forgotten as right now, so was that not that a risky move on Megatron's part?"

"I didn't know it thirty vorns ago, and I worked with the High Council of Cybertron, so not so much as you think."

"Soundwave: Also was unaware of designation of Seventh Prime."

Shadowdancer pouted as she leaned back in her chair. "Well… that's no help. 'wave, you got anything on those chips and crystals I gave you?"

"Components: Damage levels high. Required: More time."

"Perfect. Well… Spotter's on his way, I think. We can see if my favorite hacker can do anything about them."

She sighed and pulled out yet another data pad, missing the moment when the Decepticon across the desk stiffened at her offhand comment.

"Who do you have for recruitment? I have to leave the city in a bit, but I can at least give you a method of approaching them. Speaking of," she looked up then, and glanced between the mechs, "either of you mind watching the scraplet for me for a bit? I've got a ways to go and can't take him with me."

\V/

While he was waiting on the XO to free up enough of her time to escort him into Polyhex where Sunstreaker was, Sideswipe helped Trickflip with the favor he owed the minibots for helping the SPARTANs with information during the Vos attack.

The swordmech rather liked Dune Runner out of the three bots the other SPARTAN was tasked with helping, but the mutants were just down right creepy and he had seen more than he wanted to of creepy things in the last vorn than he had the rest of his entire function.

Since he wasn't tasked with hunting, Sideswipe spent his time ensuring the caverns the minibots picked out to recharge in when not hunting were free and clear of anything that might either cause a cave in or just simply attack the small bots when they returned.

He had never realized how big glitch mice could get, or that their bite could puncture his armor plate when they reached the size of his fist.

Sideswipe thought himself understandably jumpy when the Praxian made it out to Kaon's underground tunnels to collect him for their trip. The fact that the vibrations the SPARTANs gave off were similar to those of a large glitch mouse didn't help.

She was rather amused at him trying to scare her off, and for scrambling to greet his new commanding officer properly. "Well… that was one of the most original greetings I've ever gotten…"

Sideswipe's engine coughed in his embarrassment, and he was a little afraid she would be able to tell how badly his systems were heating up in the cool underground. "We're, ah… leaving now?"

"Yes… but only if you're done playing with the glitch mice…"

The swordmech tried leaving the cavern, and his mortification at being caught at something so younglingish, but realized he didn't know the way and Trickflip had warned him about walking around down here without some bot to guide him. He slapped himself, and cursed internally as he felt his cooling fans kick on. "I'm done playing, ma'am."

"Well, if you're sure. We can always stay here for a few joors, there really isn't any rush." He risked a look back at the Praxian, and she was grinning at him. "Loosen up a bit. As tightly as you've wound yourself up, you're going to snap, and I won't like it if it's me you snap at."

She patted him on the shoulder joint as she took off on the way to Polyhex.

By the time the swordmech had regained enough confidence to ask the SPARTAN-Bots' tactician questions, she had already told him why it was the Covert Ops knew the underground of Cybertron so well. They used it as a failsafe to get around in, in case of anything happening to the cities they were living in and the roads became either unnavigable or too risky for them.

"Err… Lieutenant Shadowdancer?"

"Just Shadow', Swipes. No SPARTAN stands on ceremony with another unless they're dealing with internal discipline or reporting in for a new assignment."

"Uh… Shadow', you never did tell us why it was you took us on." She cast a curious glance back at him, giving him a glimpse of gold optics in the dim tunnels. "I mean, not that we don't appreciate the chance… but with everything Rook and Trick' have to say about you and you're methods, I've been wondering why."

The Praxian came to a stop, luckily in a brighter lit cavern than the dim tunnels they had taken out of Kaon's underground. These parts of the underground were rougher than the parts just under the main cities, because there was no assigned patrol of minibots for maintenance and safety for the unused sectors of Cybertron. The ceiling, or rather the floor of the first sublevel had collapsed, and some passel of minibots had rigged up some lights so they could see where the smaller bits of rock had fallen.

"This is another one of those questions you may not like the answer to." She warned as she turned back to face him. "But before I can tell you what I want you two for, I have a question for you. How much do you know of the Decepticon faction and the bots that make it up?"

Pulling a face at the inquiry, the swordmech crossed his arms over his chassis. "Other than they're the ones raiding everything that isn't well protected across Cybertron?"

Inclining her helm to him to acknowledge the point, Shadowdancer proceeded to turn his views inside out. "There is a virus… one that I was infected with at a point, which turns bots with it into nothing more than moving automations of pure rage. Those are the bots you're talking about. I'm referring to the ones that still retain their processors and personality components that you can have a civil conversation with."

Sideswipe's mouth components shut with an audible click.

"Some of them can even resist that virus, and I'm working on saving them from the madness that seems to follow this 'Lord Megatron'. The same madness that destroyed Tarn long before any factions were defined, that caused the destruction of Kalis, Alithex, and more recently Vos. But I need some serious help in doing so." Shadowdancer spread her arms wide to include their surroundings, the barren and fractured rock as far as the optic could see. "If things continue like this, if the trend of violence escalates without a viable way to either pacify the worst of those Decepticon or the Autobots can't reach a decisive victory over them, then this is what Cybertron will turn out to be like, all across the surface. I've seen it happen, I've had to study the effects of such a thing on multiple communities and even entire worlds as a part of my psychological training, and the results are never pretty when a social matrix self-implodes like this will in time."

The Autobot, and he was still an Autobot damn it even if he was a SPARTAN too, tried to object. "But-"

"Sideswipe, answer me honestly. What would happen if the Autobots win this war?" Dropping her claws to rest on her hip joints, the femme pinned him in place with her optics. "Peace? Not with half of Cybertron deactivated and the rest too afraid of being labeled a Con for disagreeing with something that would have to trounce any opposition to obtain a dominate hold on the planet. That's the only way for this war to end in the Autobots' favor at this time, and I highly doubt that the Cons or their mentality would cease to exist even if they were defeated as they are right now. The reemergence of the Golden Age? That period of time had problems, some serious and some not. Think with that rather remarkable processor of yours, not parrot what others say."

Taken aback, both by the backhanded compliment and the order, Sideswipe did as she said and took a serious look at the current events on Cybertron, at the destruction of Vos and the death of the unit's old 2IC, as well as the escalating violence between the Decepticons and every bot who not wearing a faction insignia.

Shadowdancer spoke her next point softly, as if to drive the fact home even more. "If something doesn't change, either the violence the Cons are so ready to reach for or the Autobots' inability to control the responses of that faction, there will be no more Cybertron. It will either become as barren and as desolate after countless vorns of war as these underground regions, or there will only be small warring factions that will insist they are right because of some long forgotten slight against them. I am trying to keep that from happening."

"So what are you doing then? The Decepticons would never-"

"The Cons you're used to, the insane and rage driven ones that were once simple working class bots just like you, would never agree to some peaceful solution, true." Shadowdancer kept herself from mimicking the mech's posture, as a defensive gesture right now wouldn't help her in turning her new saboteur to her point of view, and she was sure that both Sunstreaker and Warcry would be rather annoyed with her for being forced to deactivate him.

Instead, she kept her body language open, like an instructor or somebot in a position of authority lecturing to a younger bot.

"I know a different set of Cons. What I'm asking of you is to form an opinion of them and report it back to me. If you can agree with me that not all Decepticons are the same and some deserve the time of orn on occasion, you'll stay with me in Gygax with Sunstreaker. If you can't, then I'll send you back to Iacon to do what you will."

"…and what aren't you telling me?"

The XO smirked at him, well aware that he probably privately agreed with her, but was too loyal to the Autobots still to verbalize it.

Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had a curious set of processors, she had to admit at least that much. The gold brother might be more physically dominate than the silver, but the swordmech was the thinker of the both of them.

Their unique history, both as normal working class bots and as gladiators, also lent them an additional layer of protection to what parts of her knowledge of psychology could be used on. If Sunstreaker got even a hint that his brother was uncertain or confused, he got more violent in proportion; Sideswipe got more elaborate in his thinking when his brother was violent, making for an ever widening circle of semi-dependence off each other.

However, she had one more lever to use and she was sure it would keep the two in her part of the unit.

"If you refuse to even check it out, the other Covert Ops bots would regard it as a type of betrayal."

He flinched away from the very idea of it, scowling hard enough that she knew it was mostly simply because she had probably proved some internal conclusion wrong.

She was half right. Sideswipe had to seriously rethink his stance on Decepticons with the new information and orders he had, but it was more the idea that the easy manor that both Rook and Trickflip had treated him and Sunstreaker with, and how easily Titan and Clearsight had accepted them as fellow soldiers, would be damaged by stoutly sticking with his Autobot loyalty that had him so bothered.

Being included in the groups the other soldiers in the Autobot ranks belonged to had been hard for the twins. He could do it but Sunstreaker had difficulties in modifying his behavior to match the bots around them at any given time, so he stuck with his brother and his pranks mostly. Meeting the SPARTANs had been a blessing in disguise, they were more like his sociopathic brother in temperament so Sunstreaker didn't have to pretend to hold a simple conversation with one.

"Fine. Just look, right?"

"And report an honest opinion. You'll be living with a number of Decepticons over the next few decacycles, if not stellar cycles, so I would suggest you keep an open processor."

"Yes ma'am."

"It's Shadow', Swipes. Unless you're trying to get an officer killed, then by all means have at it." She gave him a wicked smirk for the shocked look he gave her for that, turning back to the path that would take them to Polyhex and Orpheus.

They got a decent ways to the Decepticon city before Sideswipe thought of his next question, carefully thinking it over first to ensure there wouldn't be another processor fragging if he asked it. Once every meeting with the femme was enough for him. "So… about your theory on the Quintessions…"

"What about it?"

"Is that it?" When she tossed him an inquiring look over a door-wing, he tried to clarify his question. "I mean, are you doing to do anything about it?"

"What could I do? Unless there is a Quintession on Cybertron, the ultimate confirmation or rejection of that idea will have to wait until we can actually talk to one."

Sideswipe stopped in his tracks, screwing up his face plate as he asked, "You're not going to try and save _them_ , are you?"

"Frag no." Shadowdancer started laughing as she turned back to him. "The Quintessions? Save? Ha. I don't think there is any bot on Cybertron that would object to me putting a kill on sight order on them. No, all I need to know is if they call one of us 'Reclaimer'."

"What's a –"

"It's what the Forerunners called us, the SPARTANs that is." Continuing to walk on, she shrugged while there was still enough light for him to see it. "If the Quintessions can recognize us like this, then they _are_ a splinter group of Forerunners that turned tail and ran from a war centivorns ago. If not, then my theory was wrong."

Continuing to follow her, Sideswipe asked another question as they reached the very outer reaches of Polyhex's territory, helpfully pointed out by a sign the minibots had put up to warn other minibot squads that they were not going to continue clearing out the under levels of Polyhex until the surface conflict was resolved. "What do you hope for from talking with one of them?"

"Answers, hopefully. There were a lot of confusing things left behind them after the first HALO activation, and getting any number of them cleared up would be nice. I'm not putting any credits on getting a straight answer from one of them, though."

The swordmech decided he had reached his quota for asking the femme questions, and shut his mouth components for the rest of the trip.

She showed him the way up to the city streets, and they took the back alleys and streets, aided by their stealth systems, to keep his blue optics from being noted in the city populated by bots with red optics. Eventually reaching a living unit that looked rather run down, she tapped out a curious seven note knock on the door.

Orpheus opened it a moment later, suspiciously glaring out at them after cracking the manually opening door wide enough to see who it was. He grinned broadly as he threw the door open for the XO. "I've got a number of bots that just can't wait to meet you, Shadow'."

Shadowdancer, the only one visible at the moment as Sideswipe still had his stealth systems activated, rolled her optics at him and pushed him away from the door so both of them could get in.

Sunstreaker looked over from a data pad he was looking at, and the swordmech had a bad moment when he realized Sunny's optics had been turned SPARTAN orange as the Praxian tilted her helm to his location to answer the gold brother's unspoken question.

Since there were a number of Decepticons in the room with the assassin and his brother, Sideswipe kept silent and invisible, simply working his way around the bots to his twin's side.

The SPARTAN-Bots' XO looked around at the number of bots also in the room, pinning her second with an annoyed look. "Who's all here then?"

"Cyclonus and Scourge, who are just dying to meet you, Octane, and Reflector." The SPARTAN mech pointed to each bot in turn, and since the XO had their attention already by virtue of being a small framed femme and being deferred to by the assassin posing as a shock trooper, Orpheus turned to his guests for the cycle and introduced her to the room at large. "This is Shadowdancer, our superior officer and the tactical lieutenant for our unit, also known as the XO."

That being said and any required introductions out of the way, he got out of her way _fast_.

The Praxian sighed, taking in the four Decepticons Orpheus had picked out from the rest of the Cons in Darkmoor. "I do apologize mechs, but this is going to have to be fast and slightly painful."

Before any of them could move, and before Scourge could demand any answers from the shock trooper, she damn near disappeared on them. One by one, she kicked them into the wall hard enough that they were lodged in place deep enough that they had no choice but to listen to her.

"As you've all no doubt noticed, we're not exactly normal bots. Endanger anything I'm doing, and I'll hunt you down and kill you with my bare claws. For now, simply continue with what you've been doing, you'll know when we start this little coup of ours. Ask Orpheus any questions you may have," she took the time to glare not only at the assassin but at Sunstreaker as well since both mechs were snickering at the stuck Decepticons, "if you think you can get a straight answer from him. Later. Any questions for me since I'm here?"

Reflector stopped trying to pull himself out of the wall and inspected the tiny femme from helm to pedes. "Are you single?"

Shadowdancer arched an optic ridge at him, shaking her helm as Orpheus' engine loudly choked at the question and Sunstreaker started laughing at the SPARTAN's disgusted expression. "…for all of your sakes, I'm going to ignore that you said something. Orpheus, you have something else to take care of eventually, so hurry the frag up mech."

The XO swept out of the room without even a backwards look, the assassin shaking his helm at the reconnaissance mech as he none too gently yanked him out of the wall and letting him crash into the floor. "I can't believe you asked that. You do realize that was my fragging _sister_ , right?"

The force of the impact separated the three mechs that made up the larger Reflector, and Spectro got up dusting off his lower chassis. "It was Viewfinder's idea, mech. I was just along for the ride."

Spyglass rolled his optics at the other small mech that made up one third of their combined form. "Sure it was, and had nothing to do with how impressed you were when she kicked all of us in rapid sequence."

"What I would like to know is what has her in such a hurry." Viewfinder ignored the passing blame game Spectro always played and inspected the depression in the wall in the shape of their combined form.

"She's got a youngling she left in Soundwave's hands." Orpheus grunted at him as he helped Scourge pry himself more carefully out of the wall.

"Ye have got ta be kidden me." The tracker finally worked the last of his armor plates loose and turned to assist Cyclonus out of the wall. "Yer sister is yer commanding officer?"

The Decepticon assassin ignored his predicament for the moment and looked over to the shock trooper. "Soundwave?"

The SPARTAN gave up being nice and simply yanked the fuel tanker out of the wall much like he had with Reflector. "Yes, she's my sister, and yes, Soundwave. It was simply easier to call each other 'sibling' since we've spent about sixty and some vorns together to get to know one another; and that mech is Shadow's pick to lead the Cons once she finds all the bots she wants."

Sunstreaker surprised Sideswipe by getting up and helping Scourge with prying Cyclonus out of the wall, even if it was just simply yanking on metal armor plates, it was more than Sunny normally did when another bot was in trouble. "Impressive, isn't she?"

The tracker looked over to him incredulously as they finally got the assassin out of the wall. "There's a slagging word fer it. Ye've met her before?"

"Almost ran over her sparkling when we first met." The gold mech grinned wryly as Cyclonus dusted himself off and he took the few steps back to his chair. "She's something when severely irritated. Had me pinned against a wall with an energy blade in front of my optics before I even knew what was going on."

Sideswipe suppressed a fond grin, even if neither the two SPARTANs nor the Decepticons could see him. That was more like his brother, using any opportunity to rub something into another's face plate.

He got a transmission from the SPARTANs' assassin about his optic colors while the rest were talking about the program changes for his optics, and was slightly mollified about Sunstreaker's color choice when he realized that red wasn't a color the SPARTANs had given them as an option. It was simply yellow or orange like the rest of the unit.

"Scariest two astroseconds of my function, brother dear."

He flickered into view, with orange instead of blue optics and grinned at the wary looks the Decepticons gave him. He rather liked the sensation, and realized why it was the Covert Ops bots like to play with their own stealth systems.

Sunstreaker threw his now visible twin a grin. "I was wondering when you're lazy aft would show up. Have fun playing with the remains of Shockwave's experiments?"

"Whatever you can say about that mech, I'm just glad the XO ripped his helm off." Sideswipe took a seat next to his gold twin, shaking his helm in disgust. "That was _nasty_."

"Wait, yer XO took out Shockwave?" Scourge looked from one SPARTAN to the other, giving Orpheus a rude gesture for his mocking smirk. "That little bit of a femme?"

"That little bit of a femme, who just kicked you all into a wall without any opposition from the lot of you, has the highest confirmed kill count in the unit. Yeah, she's the one that deactivated Shockwave. I was even there for it." The SPARTAN had a fond grin on his lip plates now, unnerving the Decepticons in the room. "I didn't even twitch a servo. That was a fun cycle."

Cyclonus shook his helm, leading the way out of the small living unit with the three parts of the Reflector gestalt following. "I'd love to see that femme at work. Sounds impressive."

Orpheus laughed wickedly as the rest of them left. "Oh, you all have no idea."

\V/

Shadowdancer wandered back into her bar a good joor before Soundwave's next shift at the switchboards in the nearby Decepticon base, with a conflicted expression on her faceplate.

Rumble, who had badgered Dreadnought into teaching him how to mix energon, caught sight of the femme first and asked what was wrong as she passed.

"I've just gotten hit on. I'm trying decided if I'm flattered or disgusted." She patted the cassette on the helm as she headed for the staircase in the back of the bar and to where she was relatively sure her youngling was, seeing as Silentforce hadn't said anything contrary as she passed him.

Kynaite was up still, as it seemed Soundwave didn't quite have the bodyguard's touch when it came to calming her hyper youngling down for his recharge cycle. It looked like the youngling was just fighting to stay awake until she came back, he had gotten rather stubborn about making sure she was present both before and after his recharge cycles since she ducked out on him once during it.

She chalked it up to Kynaite simply being stubborn and knocked lightly on the door frame to alert the mechs in the room that she was there. "Well… this looks cozy."

Nightstalker gave her a sour look from his spot next to Ravage, as her youngling had demanded in his broken speech to be able to look at both of them and wouldn't hear of any protests from either mech. Soundwave simply shrugged, as he still had her adopted creation in his lap guiding energy low clumsy hands in checking the cassette's systems out.

From what she could see, it seemed that Kynaite had finished the desperately required repairs on the former Overlord's bodyguard and had started the more complicated mending of the frame but abandoned his work when he became too tired to hold his tools steady. Said youngling tilted his helm back enough to get a good look at her, taking in her dusty pedes and the new scrape on one leg before collapsing back fully into Soundwave, fully into his recharge cycle before he even hit the larger mech's armor.

Shadowdancer quietly snickered as she walked over to relieve the Decepticon of her youngling. "Stubborn. I wonder just where you got that from."

"Can-n-n I gue-es-s f-f-rom-m yo-ou?" Frenzy's stutter was worse with him trying not to yawn between words, and the cassette slid off the couch so she could put the young mech down.

"Oh, I'm well aware that he got it from me." She gave him a grin as she rose back up to her full high. "He was such an innocent little thing, then I adopted him and that all went straight to the Pit."


	30. Chapter 30

Ratchet caught Knightblade before she and her two Crystal City mechs were due to leave Iacon, the two of them holding a low toned conversation just outside of the Autobot base's gates much to Perceptor's bemusement. Wheeljack was less confused over the exchange, correctly guessing it had to do with why it was Warcry wasn't out there to see his sniper off.

The bluish gray and black femme eventually gave some promise to the new Autobot CMO and walked back over to where the two mechs were waiting for her. "I apparently cheated by letting you two check my systems out before he could get the rank to order it."

"Cause we did all the repairs Ratchet would have had to if we didn't?" The inventor asked cheerfully, waving as his best friend stomped back to his med bay and the tank he probably had contained within.

"Apparently. And so long as you two are checking out my spark chamber, he said he wouldn't attempt it himself until you two get back to him on the correct way to do so." The sniper rolled her optics, shaking her helm at the same time. "All this concern over our sparks… why?"

"One's spark is key to who a bot is, Knightblade." Perceptor informed her as all three of them made for the main city gates of Iacon and the bridge over the acid moat, missing the fond look the two behind him exchanged over his 'lecturing vocalizer setting'. "Cybertronians use it both as a means of identification as well as to show they are not drones, spark-less automations without a sense of self, a fully functioning member of our society."

"Wait, that's it? You're not going to go on with the multiple uses for sparks?" Teased the SPARTAN, impressed that Percy had kept his comment to a manageable length.

Looking back at his assistant, the scientist raised a questioning optic at her. "Both Wheeljack and myself have already expounded on the reasons we feel we should ensure you and your fellows are completely Cybertronian instead of simply appearing in the form of one."

"We already know we have them, Shadow' wouldn't have been able to bond with her youngling if we didn't," Knightblade returned the salute the gate guards gave the three of them on their way out of the military city, and added bitterly once they were far enough away, "even if explaining why we have one is a bit beyond us at the moment."

Wheeljack blinked and looked up at the taller femme. "Humans don't have sparks?"

Perceptor also halted and turned back to the SPARTAN sniper, waiting for an answer.

The Scientific Lieutenant of the SPARTAN-Bots sighed. "Humans have souls, not sparks. Or at least, most of them thought so. Souls weren't physically seen, more felt than anything. Supposedly, twenty one grams of it."

"Twenty one…? How do you weigh something that didn't physically appear to be verified it at least existed?" Wheeljack questioned, confused over the procedure that must have happened centivorns ago.

"By weighing a human before and after death." Knightblade smirked at the wide opticed looks that earned her. "Grim, right? But that's how one human scientist claimed a soul could be weighed."

"That was acceptable in human society?" Perceptor furrowed his optic ridges at the history, disturbed over the content. "How many times was it corroborated by repeated, conclusive experimentation?"

"Since it required the death of the human test subject, not many were interested in seeing if it was repeatable." Knightblade shrugged, to show she didn't have much more information about the experiment. "And the scientist was never verified or credited; it was more of a folk tale really. Even after a couple hundred planetary rotations, the subject was never visited again."

"I wonder how much a Cybertronians' spark weights." Wheeljack spoke aloud, earning two different looks from the bots he was standing with.

\V/

Galeforce smirked as Refit greeted the anti-armor assault specialist by jumping him with a hug. "Titan! How have you been?"

The white and black Enforcer pried the SPARTANs' medic off him carefully. "Fine, 'fit. Meet Bumblebee, he's my new charge."

The yellow and black youngling waved up to the taller tan and black femme warily, uncertain of who it was his Guardian had brought him out of the city's walls to see.

Raising an optic ridge at the ex-SWAT Enforcer, the SPARTAN-Bots' 2IC extended a hand to the young mech. "Hello, Bumblebee. I'm Galeforce, and this is Refit."

"Hi." The shorter mech peered up at the taller bots, looking from his Guardian to the other two. "Are you more of Ti's sibling units?"

"Yep." Refit nodded at him cheerfully. "I'm the medic."

At the youngling's alarmed look, she smirked.

"I'm just here to make sure your Guardian is operating correctly. And you too, it seems."

Bumblebee nodded to her, taking a step behind his SPARTAN. Seeing the medics had never been fun when he had been just a ward of the Youth Sectors, and he didn't think seeing the SPARTANs' medic would be any more fun.

Titan was more concerned with the look the combat engineer was giving him that his youngling's actions towards their medic. "Long story."

Clapping his fellow SPARTAN on the shoulder joint, Galeforce smirked at him. "I look forward to hearing it."

(ooo000ooo)

Since Titan was still on duty, Refit and Galeforce took the youngling back to the Enforcer's living unit so the medic could check out Bumblebee first. The youngling wasn't entirely enthused by the idea, but since they had the same symbol as Titan, Tigerstripe, Trickflip, and Sideswipe had on the left armor plate covering their upper arms, he figured they were more SPARTANs like his new Guardian and deserved the same respect.

Refit started out simply enough, for some curious reason she had equipment intended for younglings with her, and checked over Bumblebee's wires and connections to his motor control relays first. "Alright, stretch out now."

As she was doing so, Galeforce wandered over close enough to talk to the younger mech. "How did you become Ti's? All I heard about the incident here was about that Mirror bot, not that we now have a new youngling."

"Titan told me that that Inkblot mech, who was also your Mirror bot, was targeting him through spreading information about you and the other SPARTANs, to try and lure you in to 'steal' your parts." Bumblebee informed him blithely, watching closely as the medic started in on testing his motors and hydraulics, something that had always felt weird before with other medics.

Galeforce felt his optic ridge raise, connecting a few dots in his processors he didn't think had been connected before. "So, you and the other younglings know what we are."

"I was the only one to put it all together." Proudly stated, the youngling started swinging his pedes when the femme finished his physical with checking his fuel lines and engine and finally looked up at the gray and green mech. "The others don't know it's Titan here, but they do know of you all."

"Tilt your helm forward, please."

The combat engineer gave a rueful chuckle as Refit moved on to checking Bumblebee's processors and firewalls. "Figures. So you were bait, and Trick' and Sides followed it back to the bot. That still doesn't explain how you came to be Titan's charge."

The youngling grinned, peering up at the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots from where Refit had had him position his helm to see into it. "Tigerstripe said Ti' panicked… and I might have asked a couple thousand times when he was trying to figure out how to keep an optic on me. That's how I became Titan's."

Galeforce laughed, saluting the younger mech. "That's thinking with your CPU, 'bee. Suppose the only thing I have to say to that is: Welcome to the family."

Once Refit removed her devices, he patted the youngling on the helm, adding wryly as he thought about the other sly like bots in the unit, a trait not entirely restricted to the Covert Ops bots.

"You'll fit right in."

As the two mechs moved to the main room of the living unit so the medic could set up for Titan, Bumblebee started asking the older mech questions about the SPARTANs, pouting only a little when he realized he wouldn't get much more than he had out of Titan.

(ooo000ooo)

Titan knocked lightly on Griz's door frame, peering around the opened office door to the bots inside. "Boss mech? I've got a medical check later this cycle."

The forensic mech looked up with a measure of alarm. "Is there anything wrong?"

'Naw. It's routine, as far as I know." The ex-SWAT Enforcer leaned his frame against the door frame, returning the nod Wraith gave him. "But I won't be available during it."

Griz frowned thoughtfully. "Then we're going to need another Enforcer for the time you're off-line. That's problematic."

"Would an Autobot work? My brother's in the city, and I'm sure he wouldn't mind helping out."

Jadelight turned around to face him. "The same brother you contacted for the bots in Kaon?"

"No, 'force's in Gygax now, with our younger sister." Titan had his optics turned to the ceiling, missing the confused looks on the other bots' faceplates. "Galeforce is usually in Iacon, but he's got a small escort mission out here for one of the Autobots' medics."

Wraith raised an optic ridge at him. "How many sibling units do you have, mech?"

Shrugging, the SPARTAN responded blithely. "Sixteen… uh, -ish." He frowned himself, counting off the number on the digits of both servos. "Seventeen… one deactivated, three added… fine, nineteen if you don't count the younger bots."

"That's a very… large family unit." Griz stated slowly.

Titan shrugged again as he pushed himself off the door frame. "Not really, there used to be more of us. Later bots."

Wraith bolted to the door to catch the Enforcer before he could leave. "If we need your brother, how do we contact him?"

"Just hit up my comm line, Refit will transfer you over if I'm not up yet." The SPARTAN gave the other mech a backwards wave as he left the forensic lab.

(ooo000ooo)

Galeforce was rather bemused to learn he had been volunteered to cover Titan's job for a bit, but shrugged at the news dismissively as the larger SPARTAN let himself into his living unit. "You're not expecting anything, right?"

"Nope, it's just in case." Titan responded as he ran his hand over Bumblebee's helm. "What did Refit say?"

"Nothing yet. I think she's waiting on you."

"She's really nice. I like her."

"Well, that's good. Seeing she's our main and only medic, unless you want to go with Ratchet." The white and black SPARTAN stated dryly. "And Ratchet's a bit…"

"Grumpy." Galeforce finished for him with a grin.

"I would say easily irritable, but we can go with that too." Refit piped up, grinning herself as she walked into the main room with one of Titan's extra data pads in hand. "I've finished 'bee's checkup, and recorded it for his Youth Sector. All you have to do now is turn it in, Ti'."

She easily kept the larger mech from grabbing the pad from her, indicating his berth room where she had set up shop with the contested pad.

"After we're done with you."

Titan damn near pouted at her, but the medic just smirked at him and tossed the data pad to Galeforce.

After the two of them disappeared into the larger mech's berth room, Bumblebee turned to the gray and green mech curiously. "What does it say?"

The SPARTAN-Bots' 2IC blinked down at him. "Uh… I didn't look."

\V/

Drax frowned at what Spotter gave him. "That's it?"

"Well, most of the other seekers don't really like the idea of rebuilding where Vos fell… and they're kinda paranoid that another attack might happen, given we'll be the first to rebuild after what could be called a failed attack by the Cons."

"So they're opting to stick close to one of the main Autobot bases?" The SPARTAN trine leader raised one hand to the back of his helm, working the stiff cables there loose. "Either here or Central. Lovely choice of scenery."

Tigerstripe snorted at the dark seeker's comment. As far as Cybertron went, scenery was just limited to rock formations, the skyline of other cities, or the ruins of once prosperous cities that had fallen into disrepair with the fall of the Golden Age.

Since the seekers had been displaced, and were unable to use the old Aero Space HQ for meetings and the like, Drax had commandeered the _ATHENS_ for most of the seeker council's use. The ship herself didn't seem to care, or at least as far as the smallest SPARTAN trine member could tell.

That meant the three aerial members of the SPARTAN-Bots were in the bridge with Hailstorm, Quicksilver, and Lightning. Whiteout and Lunais were still settling seekers, keeping them calm in the quarters the Autobots had generously handed over for their use.

Drax ran his clawed hand over his face plate, thanking any and every deity he knew of that Spotter had already started in on the anti-virus for the Decepticons' indoctrination virus. He really didn't want to dwell on what kind of attitude his seekers would have had after Vos fell with the virus still in full swing.

There were still incidents, but they weren't as bad as they could have been.

"Fine, right, anyways. So since we know where we're going, how the slag are we going get the credits to pay for a new Aero Space Division headquarters, much less the rest of the city?"

"The seeker council has a store of credits put away in case of emergencies." Hailstorm offered placidly, not nearly concerned over the issues of relocation as the Air Commander seemed to be. "They were placed in a trust in Ankmoor. We can use that, because I do think this qualifies for an emergency."

Spotter's turbines hummed, drawing attention over to him. "We should place our new city near Central. Iacon is a bit out of the way for trade routes, and closer to Central we would have less import taxes to traverse uncontrolled territory."

"Like Holdout's going to be pleased that we're going to be looming over her shoulder plates." Tigerstripe chipped in, shaking his helm. "How about halfway between Iacon and Central? There's a cliff that was cut in two to make room for the highway. We can perch this 'Neo Vos' on the top."

Drax cut a flat look to the largest SPARTAN seeker.

" _Neo Vos?_ Never. Not in a million vorns, 'stripes. We need a better name." He glanced over to where the _ATHENS_ had pulled up a map of the terrain in question. "But I do like the cliff idea. That would keep most from complaining that it's not high enough."

The femme council seeker clapped her hands together, delighted that it hadn't taken nearly as long to decide as it did to gather options. "I will alert the others. Now all we need is an engineer."

"Wheeljack." Three SPARTAN seekers spoke in unison.

Hailstorm blinked, looking at an equally lost Lightning. "And he is?"

Drax got up, intending to hunt down his sniping sister and her two mechs who had just left Iacon earlier that cycle. "A friend of a sibling, or you could call him a friend of a friend. I'm sure he wouldn't mind helping us out."

\V/

Knightblade had insisted on seeing her sister SPARTAN before the three of them left Central for Crystal City, so Perceptor and Wheeljack had tagged along with the sniper to see the SPARTANs' tracker.

Holdout had a rare cycle off without Sandstorm, and the supply femme invited them out to a bar before they left her assigned city. Once the conversation had progressed past the usual catching up, Holdout broached a topic that had Perceptor's audio receptors prickling.

"So, what did you find out about Shadow's little theory?"

"It's possible." Responded the other SPARTAN femme glumly. "They occurred in the same time frame, or as close to it as I've calculated it out. I've passed it back to Shadow'."

Holdout raised an optic ridge at her sister's soured mood. "Okay… so, are you going to tell me what crawled up your tailpipe, or do I have to play fifty questions?"

Pulling a face at the tracker, the sniper hoisted her cube up instead of answering.

The bronze and black femme raised her other optic ridge to join her other one, and got up with a crooked finger joint to Perceptor. "We're going to need more high-grade. Be right back."

As soon as the scientist joined her, Holdout grabbed him by the arm and dragged him over to the bar.

"There's only a few things I've found to work to overcharge a SPARTAN, and the _ATHENS_ ' mid-grade is only one of them. Normally, high-grade won't do much for us, we're used to a more pure form of fuel, but there is this one." Pointing out the ingredients to both the scientist and the bartender, she added one last thing to her small lesson to the mech before the mix was done. "When Knight' gets this bad, pour this down her throat cables until she spills what's wrong."

Perceptor raised an optic ridge of his own over the concoction as it was handed to him with a broad grin from the bartender, which had changed from the green hue of normal energon to an acidic yellow. "This will not perpetrate any impairment to my associate, will it?"

"Wow, and here I thought 'jack was joking." The SPARTAN continued before he could question her over the comment about the inventor. "I've tried damn near everything, trust me. If it won't kill me or 'storm, it won't hurt Knight'."

Looking from the cube in his hand to the SPARTAN next to him collecting a few more cubes, the scientist decided he was more reassured by the mention of the Wrecker than the tracker's claim it wouldn't harm the sniper if it didn't harm her.

Holdout was the broadest built femme in the SPARTAN ranks, with the odd curves that the femmes of the unit had instead of the more angular frames other bots in the function class had, and he already knew the SPARTANs were built to handle more than any other bot could claim to.

When Drax arrived with Sandstorm the better part of a joor later, Knightblade had gone from stone cold sober and moody to completely smashed and quiet in record time.

For a SPARTAN, anyways.

The trine leader raised an optic ridge at the overcharged sniper, letting Holdout greet her intended as he looked to a bemused Perceptor. Said scientist pointed to the tracker as Wheeljack snickered in the corner. "The previous events that led to this result were recommended by Holdout."

"She's a lightweight, so it's not as bad as it looks." Holdout vacated her chair for her Wrecker, who took it and pulled her down into his lap, before looking up at the dark painted seeker mech. "She's moody."

Drax made a hum sound from his turbines, checking the contents of Knightblade's cubes. "You do know this slag knocked Spot' onto his wing plates for a couple of joors, right? He couldn't recall anything from the previous off-cycle either."

"I don't touch that fragging mix lightly, Drax. Pull up a chair, this looks like it's going to take a while."

Wheeljack looked over to the SPARTAN trine leader once he had done as the tracker ordered. "So, this happens a lot?"

The lone seeker in the bar shook his helm. "Just for Knight'. I found out the hard way it was better to just get her overcharged to see what's wrong with her. She's got a bad habit of just compressing her problems."

"He's the one that told me to do this, the first time she got moody here." The sober SPARTAN femme added in Preceptor's direction. "You can thank him once this is over with."

"How long is this supposed to persist?" Perceptor worriedly watched the sniper as she drained half of her latest cube and scowl into it. He wasn't sure if Knightblade would become irritable or even violent when overcharged, he had assumed the sniper had avoided high-grade for a reason.

"Until she spills. Shouldn't be long now." Holdout commented, adding wryly, "She's already gone through more of that than I'd thought she'd last."

Drax looked over the amount of cubes the sniper had gone through and frowned. "You don't say. It's got to be something from _before_ , if it's taking this much."

Wheeljack looked over to the two other SPARTANs, alarmed. "Is here safe for her to, uh… spill?"

"It won't make much sense to any bot else, 'jack. But since we're waiting," the SPARTAN trine leader turned to the inventor, "I need a design for a city."

Blinking at the change of conversation, the green and white mech tilted his helm. "For your seekers? Where are you putting that?"

"Between here and Iacon, the cliffs that overlook the highway."

Knightblade suddenly slammed her last, and empty, cube on the table, glaring over at her fellow SPARTANs. "My slagging _creators_ studied the fragging Forerunners."

"Frag it." Drax shoved up from the table and took the overcharge sniper's arm to lead her out of the crowded building. "That's right; we're processing more like Cybertronians now."

"Out, I'll handle the bill." Holdout ordered the mechs before dashing over to the bar.

Sandstorm followed the seeker without question, Perceptor and Wheeljack only moments behind the Autobot. They only caught a few of Knightblade's slurred words, but most of it sounded rather vicious and in the XO's direction.

Holdout rejoined them a few streets from her address, looking rather amused. "Three hundred credits, on the house. The bartender hadn't seen any bot drink like that in his entire career."

Drax cast her an annoyed look, typing in her security code with one hand while still supporting the slight frame of the sniper with the other.

Once inside the seeker sat Knightblade on the tracker's couch and scowled down at her. "So this is about Shadowdancer?"

The femme in his grip suddenly looked miserable. "No, not her. I can't recall them anymore."

Holdout stopped dead in her tracks, having decided the femme was going to stay with her for the rest of the cycle and was on her way to make up the guest berth room, and whirled to face the other two SPARTANs in her living unit. "You could _recall_ them?"

"Not anymore. I _knew_ who they were, who _I_ was, even with all the trainers tried to do to stamp it out. Now," Knightblade smiled bitterly, tipsily swaying on the couch even in a seated position, "nothing. They're gone."

When it seemed that none of the SPARTANs were going to explain, Perceptor asked the one most likely to answer any questions. "Holdout, whom is she speaking of?"

"Her original creators." The tracker stated slowly. "I can't recall mine; I was way too young when I was found. Most of the others have never mentioned if they could recall their own original creators or their functions as human younglings before the SPARTAN Program. Shadowdancer and her fellow class threes only know who they are because she went through ONI's records on them once."

Knightblade's systems hiccupped, and the femme collapsed sideways into Drax's arms.

Holdout shook her helm as she continued to her guest berth room. "Well, _frag_."

"That was a bit worse that I was expecting." The seeker agreed as he hefted the slighter femme into his arms.

Perceptor though about what he had learned, and spoke up when the two SPARTANs had reentered the main room. "It is likely that the memory files in question are not as lost as Knightblade assumes. Cybertronians compress previous memory files to free space for more after certain moments of note. It is conceivable that the files still remain within her memory banks."

"Well, whatever you do, don't let on to how you found out to do anything. She'll kill us." Holdout even winced at the thought.

"I am unsure of uncompressing the files, in the eventuality that your more sociable differences are attributed to that function of your CPUs."

"Well, she's out now." When the scientist flatly glared at her for that, the tracker shrugged. "You can't tell her we did this. If you think her being more SPARTAN was bad a vorn ago, it'll be nothing compared to how she'll be if she finds out we got her overcharged to get her to spill what was bothering her."

Drax grimaced over the reminder. "She damn near shot me through the helm the first time, then she thanked me after a fragging week."

"Honesty is the best policy when dealing with your sister unit. She has refrained from misleading me, returning the gesture is what I intend."

The Supply Lieutenant for the SPARTAN-Bots sighed. "Well, if you want to deal with Knightblade in ice queen mode, have at it. I'll be as far away as I can get."

Drax looked to Wheeljack, who was looking rather concerned over the state the sniper was in. "Plans, 'jack. For a seeker city."

"Oh, right." The inventor looked up to the seeker, trying to recall everything that would be required. "Uh… I need the specs for which cliff you intend to use, the dimensions and all that to work with."

"Both. We intend to use both cliffs, 'jack. But I'll get Spotter to send them to you." Drax glanced to where the comatose sniper lay. "I'm getting the frag out of here before she tries to shoot me again."

Sandstorm raised an optic ridge at Holdout, who made a face at him even as she turned for the door.

"Yes, your place. Lock up before you all leave." She added to the two Crystal City mech still standing in the main room of her living unit.

Wheeljack looked to the scientist, with weak pulses of greenish white light spilling from his vocalizer. "It can't be that bad, right?"

"If the conversation transpires to make a change for the worst, we lay responsibility of the incident on Holdout's influence."

"Sure."

\V/

To say Knightblade wasn't pleased by the events was putting it mildly.

When she onlined with a massive processor ache and a hangover, she was suspicious but not all too bad in her mannerisms. A bit more snappish than usual, but Perceptor had figured she was allowed that with how heavily she was drinking last cycle.

When the two mechs were done telling the femme everything that had gone on last cycle, frigid was an understatement.

Her optics even flashed red for a moment, severely alarming both mechs. She royally reamed the both of them out for letting it happen, disappeared for a while, and came back slightly calmer.

Wheeljack warily raised an optic ridge at the still frosty sniper from over his early cycle cube of energon, something the SPARTAN femme only occasionally got around to. "So, how bad off is Holdout?"

"Fragging glitch laughed at me." Knightblade huffed, still glaring at the far wall.

"Both she and the seeker trine leader Drax insisted it was the proper method to dealing with your frame of processor." Perceptor added just as carefully as the inventor had asked his question.

"It's not exactly healthy, Percy."

The reappearance of his nickname was a good sign, he hoped. "Your refusal to clarify what was amiss alarmed us both to the point we were seeking solutions from your siblings, Knightblade. As your brother stated previously, compressing your problems is similarly unhealthy for methods of sorting out complications in one's function."

Knightblade cut her gold optics over to the scientist. "Tell you what, this never happens again and I'll tell you when I have a problem."

Perceptor didn't even need an astrosecond to process the offer. "Agreed."

With a sigh, the sniper got up and walked over to the table the two mechs were sitting at. "I'm still annoyed with the both of you, so don't think you're getting off from getting me overcharged."

"So long as you don't shoot us, I think we'll be fine." Wheeljack flashed her a hopeful burst of blue light, wincing when the femme's optics light up.

"Thanks for the reminder, 'jack. I've got on last thing to do here." Knightblade pulled her ill-used sniper's rifle out of her subspace, checking it over quickly.

Both Perceptor and Wheeljack got to their pedes, alarmed. "Err… Knight', you don't intend to shoot us, right?"

"Not you, Drax." The sniper clicked the Forerunner built sniper rifle's magazine back in place, turning on one pede to head out of the tracker's living unit. "I'm going to clip his wing as a reminder not to frag off the slagging _sniper_."

"You can make that far of a shot?"

"It won't be that far, 'jack. I'll bet you anything he's where he intends to put that new seeker city with Spot' and 'stripes."

Knightblade had to subspace the sniper rifle when traveling through the city's streets but once she reached the tallest point of the city, the Hall of Record's top spire, she pulled it out again and aimed it in the direction of Iacon. Laying on the front of her chassis, the sniper carefully aimed and scanned what she could see with her scope.

"Got him."

(ooo000ooo)

Spotter gave his trine leader a look that said the slighter seeker thought he was crazy, or at least had a few chips missing somewhere. "You're _joking_ …"

Tigerstripe looked between them, figuring it was something the class twos knew about and he didn't. "What's wrong? So they got Knight a little overcharged, it can't be that bad."

"The last time Drax did that, Knight' shot at him." The recon scout bluntly informed their biggest trine mate. "Bet you fifty she does it again."

The aerial tank snorted. "Knight's not going to shoot a fellow SPARTAN."

Drax opened his mouth to add to the conversation, but winced and cut himself off when a sharp pain through his left wing plate registered. "Fragging-!"

Spotter clicked his finger joints at Tigerstripe, since Cybertonians couldn't snap their finger joints. "Pay up."

"Damn." The larger seeker there peered through the neat hole in the tip of the SPARTAN trine leader's wing plate and dug out the fifty credits out of his subspace without another comment.

\V/

Since most of what Orpheus did was tied into his assassination protocols, the SPARTAN mech simply put the final touches on both twin's stealth skills while they were waiting on Spotter to send them a copy of the protocols geared for Sunstreaker's processors.

Leaving them a whole lot of time free when the dark green and black mech had to work at the Darkmoor Decepticon base, and more time that Sideswipe used to consider the XO's order.

Polyhex was a Decepticon city by choice. Their Governor might have initially made the decision to follow Megatron, and the city might have followed in the mech's wake at first; but the residents, merchants, dockworkers, soldiers, and even the bum bots were squarely behind that choice now. The actions of the Decepticon faction was the normal gossip, and while some of the news that reached the two once Autobot front-liners were sometimes skewed in how they were reported, most of it was the same as they could have gotten in Iacon.

The brother's now orange optics attracted a lot less attention, making it easier to simply visit a café for fuel or wander around the city and hear what the city bots thought of just about everything. Sideswipe also learned more about the virus that Shadowdancer had somehow gotten both of them immune to.

It was in variations, but you could see it everywhere.

The first symptom of the virus was an increase in aggression, which meant the gladiator arenas were nearly packed full. They weren't even illegal in Polyhex like it was in Neutral or Autobot held cities so they were everywhere and anywhere an arena could fit, and just about every type of bot could been seen fighting in them.

All it was really doing was weeding out the bots that could actually fight from the bots that couldn't tell one end of a rifle from the other, but the silver swordmech figured that the civilians couldn't see that.

He wouldn't have seen it on his own, but the assassin had told them in blunt terms what the intent of the practice actually was.

The second effect was a decrease in morals, which should have increased the amount of violence and criminal activity in the city. However the Enforcers of Polyhex had been replaced with military types that patrolled the streets, and all criminal offences were Smelter Pit offences.

Although scary to see for the first time, it was strangely numbing after the third time you had to watch some bot get tossed into the great vats of melted metal the city maintained at all times.

Sideswipe had thought to ask what happened to keep the city at nearly full capacity, seeing as a good number of bots were offlined every cycle. Orpheus just grinned wickedly at the question, and informed both twins that with the loss of morals went inhibitions, and sometimes common sense, as well.

The silver swordmech had stopped asking questions from the assassin after that, he wasn't about to start ticking off another SPARTAN he might have to go to with a problem.

After the dark green and black mech had stopped laughing at him, he informed them that the SPARTANs were not the first bots to use the underground tunnels to sneak into a city, and they should have caught that themselves.

After being alerted to it, the twins could see what the assassin meant. It seemed there always was a new bot in the city, even with the gates on the surface locked and barred by Decepticon troops. Optic ridges weren't even raised over new arrivals, just dealt with in the easiest manner and then overlooked.

That usually meant the new bots were shoved in the Dead End. The second thing Orpheus did with the two of them was show them that district of the city once he had the free time.

"These bots, the broken and rusted ones, not the shiny new ones, are bots that have been here for vorns." Orpheus had stated as he took the two of them down the main street of the slums. "They came here because it was easier to be forgotten here than where they came from. I've spent more time here than I liked, it was the first place I lived nearly a fragging vorn ago. Some of these bots once had a place in Cybertronian history, more than half of them were old military mechs and femmes. But because of how the Autobots painted Decepticons, they couldn't live peacefully where they came from when the military collapsed."

Sunstreaker was watching the bots closely, picking out which ones were really rusted and which ones were actually faking it to blend in. "Why here?"

"Because Straxus promised them a clean slate. That they wouldn't be judged for what their function was." The larger mech knocked politely on an empty door frame, surprising both twins.

The bot that answered the knock was another surprise. She was rusty as well, but the parts under her oxidized armor were well maintained. "Orpheus, business or pleasure?"

"It's business, Emerald. Vesper in?"

"It's always business with you. That's no fun." The green femme pouted at him, but beckoned to all three of them to follow here.

Sideswipe figured it was a boarding unit, renting out berth rooms for a rate per cycle, at first glance. The farther in the green and rust femme lead him, the more he started to doubt his own conclusion.

When the femme called 'Emerald' lead them into the back rooms, where the berth rooms should have been, both twins raised their optic ridges over the military command center that had seemed to melt out of the very walls.

"Oh, Vesp'! Your favorite caller is here." 'Emerald' called out cheerfully, ducking the wrench that was thrown at her helm from a higher level. "Have at Orph'."

"Thanks, Greenlight." Before Sideswipe could even turn around to see the former Ancient Council member that was reported deactivated in the wake of the Decepticons' rise to prominence, the assassin grabbed him roughly and pulled him along. "Don't even hint at that femme being alive, you'll get her killed. Being dead is safer here."

'Vesper' seemed to be some kind of medic. At least the mech was working on another bot, which had what seemed to be a laser burned hole in the middle of his chassis, and only briefly looked back at the SPARTAN. "Orpheus. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You said you knew two gladiator twins once, right? Well, I'd like you to meet them. Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, this is Vesper."

The twins got one good look at the mech, before the silver twin started laughing. " _Bludgeon?_ Damn, mech. I haven't seen you in forever!"

The other Metallikato user smiled grimly. "Shut it Sides. Like your mech said, real designations can get a bot killed here."

"Err… sorry. Still kinda getting used to this." The silver mech rubbed the back of his helm, looking over the other swordmech he once fought with in three on three fights in the gladiator pits under Tarn. "But… uh, _Vesper_ , what the slag are you doing here?"

"I should be asking that of you to. The last I heard, you were joining the Autobots." Bludgeon shook his helm, turning back to the mech he was working on. "I'm a fragging medic, or at least the only fragger in Dead End with enough familiarity with military frames to repair them."

Sunstreaker snorted. "Obviously."

"Still as succinct as ever, I see." The mech finished off what he was doing, carefully reactivating the mech on his stained repair berth. "Spanner? You alive?"

"That is always a pleasant way to end a repair, _Vesper_." The scientist carefully sat up, holding on hand to the hole through his middle. The mech grimaced at the sight, looking up at the Metallikato user. "Can't you repair the armor too?"

"Don't have the supplies to. You should just be grateful we dragged your slagged up aft out of that mess you found yourself in. Now get off my berth."

The Neutral scientist winced as he got up, as some of his cables and wires were still kinked from taking a point blank shot to the lower chassis. "You have my thanks; now take a running jump off the top ledge of Darkmoor."

Spanner nodded to Orpheus as he passed, ignoring the metallic painted twins on his way out of the room.

Sideswipe looked from the other swordmech to Orpheus, suspicious of the change he saw in his old friend. Sunstreaker merely twisted his lip plates as the assassin confirmed what the two of them were thinking. { _The virus again. I've distributed the anti-virus as broadly as I could, but there was still some damage as you can see._ }

"So," Bludgeon tuned to the three SPARTANs with a grin, wiping the energon on his hands off with a synthetic rag, "why don't we go somewhere else and catch up, mechs?"

(ooo000ooo)

As Sideswipe left for the bar with his brother to get them all high-grade, Bludgeon turned to Orpheus. "This have anything to do with that sister of yours I want to meet?"

"Sides' is Rooks', Sunny's mine." The SPARTAN Decepticon shock trooper's lip plates twisted into a smirk. "And you still haven't explained why it was you want to meet Shadow'."

"Since apparently it was her suffering through this slagging virus that kept me from becoming just like every other Con in the fragging ranks, I want to shake her hand."

"Claws."

"Whatever." The swordmech waved on hand in the air, glaring at the assassin. "Point remains, without her boldly going forward with having the virus, I'd be…"

"Some spark less automation with less honor than smarts?" Orpheus raised an optic ridge at the mech, snickering at his snort. "Shadow' will just look at you like you're stupid. Which isn't all that far from the truth."

Bludgeon snorted again. "And without you here, we'd all be dead, mech. That raid you foiled probably would've killed any type of organized resistance to this slag going on, and with all the bots here damn well seeped in that virus there wouldn't be another one."

\V/

Since they could skip Crystal City, Knightblade already had her reboot and any medical issue could be dealt with there with both a scientist and an inventor slash engineer at hand, Refit and Galeforce were in the middle of making plans to get to Ankmoor and Clearsight when Titan's comm line was hit with an inbound call. The SPARTANs' medic answered it, listening for a moment before transferring it to the combat engineer.

: _-although I would like to ask-_ :

Galeforce raised an optic ridge. : _Who is this?_ :

: _Err… wow, that was fast. Um… you're Galeforce, right? Titan's brother? We've got a little problem._ :

Since it was the Enforcer's comms that had been called up, the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots assumed it was one of the forensic bots the ex-SWAT mech worked with. : _I'll be right there._ :

Looking in on where Bumblebee had been set up with his own room, the mech walked back into the main room and pinned the little medic femme with a stern look.

"Anything happens, get Ti' up. I don't care if it will screw with the results; he's dealing with whatever happens while I'm out."

Refit nodded to show she understood, watching a little worriedly as the green and gray mech left the living unit.

(ooo000ooo)

A 'little' problem was a raid by a number of bots intent on destroying some kind of evidence, apparently.

Galeforce simply ensured the bots were threatening the lab workers first before releasing his governors, not in any mood to take it easy on the bots. The sight of one lone Autobot was at first laughable, until the combat engineer smashed in a helm by using a nearby wall.

The fighting was quick and dirty; more often than not the SPARTAN had to take some of the mechs and femmes apart to get them to stay down. There were less than thirty of them, spread out over all five levels of the forensic lab, so most of the time was taken up searching out the next knot of wanabe saboteurs.

As he found them, he sent out the lab workers to stay outside of the building while he cleared it out, searching for Titan's group of forensic bots. Finally giving up finding them on his own, Galeforce used the building's directory for visitors to find one 'Griz's' office. "Of course it would be the top fragging floor."

He was on the third, so he figured he should just continue what he was doing in clearing out floors before going up another level. Since there were six floors to the structure, he had to go through another ten bots before he spotted the smashed windows of Griz's office.

Only glancing once at the crushing shards under pede, the SPARTAN mech called out. "Any bot here?"

Since he was sure there wasn't an infestation of glitch mice, the scuttling sounds had to be a bot not inclined to answer. Anxious over how long he had left the medic alone for, the combat engineer simply hefted a large piece of the ceiling that came down and revealed three bots that had been using it as cover. "Hello, Jadelight, Wraith, and Griz, I take it?"

The femme blinked up at him, no less surprised than the others but having less in the immediate way of an injury and a weapon to deal with. " _You're_ Galeforce?"

Shoving the heavy bit of construction grade plaster to one side, the SPARTAN nodded shortly. "That's me. Let's go already."

"Wait, Griz can't be moved." Jadelight looked down to where her hands were, covered in her superior's energon. "He took a bad hit to the fuel pump. If either of us move, he'll bleed out."

Galeforce knelt down to take a closer look at the mech lying prone on the floor. "Damn. What did he do, jump in front of a blaster shot?"

Wraith blinked at him. "Well… yes. How-?"

"I've seen it before. Autobot, remember? Move. I'm an engineer, and what I can't deal with the medic I have on the comms right now can."

(ooo000ooo)

Refit, although happy to hear from him, was less amused at the damage the older mech had caused himself. She instructed Galeforce in how to temporarily strengthen the fuel pump to last through being moved to the medics on the street level around the building, and once the bleeding of the fuel lines stopped the SPARTAN lifted Griz into what had once been called a fireman's carry and simply walked down the stairs with him over his shoulder joints.

Still keeping a link to the little medic, Galeforce was not amused by the reporter bots that had encircled the forensic lab. "If it's not the one thing, it's something else, huh?"

"What?" Jadelight looked up to the Autobot in confusion, following his line of sight to the news bots. "Is that bad? How is it bad?"

The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots gave her a dry look as he pushed the main doors of the lab open. "You're about to find out."

After being passed through the encirclement of Enforcers, Galeforce's decal as an Autobot soldier and his faction insignia easing the way slightly, one of the reporters shoved a vid cam into his faceplate before the four of them could reach where the medics had set up to treat both the forensic lab workers and the bots the Enforcers were still pulling out of the building in pieces. "I'm a reporter from Central News. Is it true you are a part of a top secret Autobot unit sent to defend civilian populations?"

The combat engineer shoved the cam away rather roughly. "Move it. This mech needs the medics."

Since Griz's fuel pump had started leaking again, down the green and gray mech's side and back, the reporters backed off a bit. They still circled around him like a vulture, watching every movement just in case he betrayed himself that way.

Once Galeforce set the older mech down to where a medic could deal with the fuel pump replacement, they tightened up and pressed him for answers again.

Crossing his arms and glaring out at the sea of vid cams, the combat engineer only spoke when the medic mused on where to send the forensic bot to recover. "I know a medic who's in the city for a bit, I'll take him there."

The comment caused a renewed amount of chatter from the reporters, but the medic nodded her thanks to him and beckoned over the Enforcers to clear them out of the Autobot's way. "Good luck."

"Thanks. Come on, you two." Now that Griz was no longer in danger of bleeding out, the SPARTAN simply threw him over one shoulder joint and walked off, the Enforcers shoving the reporters back from following him and the other two.

Jadelight kept her optics on the press of bots, giving the mech that had breezed his way pass the bots that had injured her superior. "Are you?"

Galeforce sighed, shifting his hold on the still unconscious mech. "Hold all questions, please. I'll get around to answering them, I promise."

(ooo000ooo)

Titan was up, and already filled in on what had gone on by the news vids reporting everything. He grinned weakly at his brother as he came in. "You suck _slag_ , bro. You know they'll trace you to me eventually, right?"

"Processor ache?" Galeforce asked knowingly as he set the previously injured mech down so Refit could get a good look at the blaster wound and see if moving him had undone any of the other medic's work.

"Yeah." The Enforcer nodded his helm, winced at the action, and waved to the other two forensic bots as they entered his living unit. "Can you do me a favor and take 'bee to the Youth Sector, Wraith? I'd ask Gale', but a vid of his ugly aft is all over the city at the moment."

"What in the Pit is going on?" Wraith asked instead of answering, looking from the Enforcer to the Autobot to the medic.

Refit looked up at him, concerned over how high the mech's vocalizer had gotten. "Ti' we need a few cubes of what you have. Now, please."

"How many?" The white and black SPARTAN asked as he got up, frowning a bit at how unstable he was on his own pedes.

"Three."

Galeforce collapsed on Titan's couch. "We may as well start when your mech there wakes up, so if you're not going to take 'bee…"

"I'll take him." Wraith stated as the Enforcer came back into the main room with four dusty cubes rather than the number the medic ordered. Even if he had missed his normal recharge that cycle, the forensic mech looked at the cubes suspiciously as the SPARTAN handed them out. "What is it?"

"Mid-grade." The Autobot answered as he took the last cube from the Enforcer. "A bit more pure than anything I'm sure you've tried before."

Refit ignored the question, already hooking up the cube passed to her to empty into the older mech's tanks.

Wraith and Jadelight still waited for the Autobot to take the first sip from his cube before trying it.

Bumblebee staggered out of his berth room, a little nonplussed over the number of visitors that cycle as he wandered over to where Titan had sat down. "What's going on?"

The Enforcer just pointed out the news vid that was still playing on the entertainment system as they looped again to speculation on the SPARTANs' unit.

Snickering, the yellow and black young mech simply shook his helm. "So every bot else is going to catch on now? I still figured it out first."

Galeforce hummed a moment, looking up at Titan's ceiling. "Nope, sorry 'bee. But the credit for catching on first has to go to Red Alert."

"Didn't he say he couldn't guess what we are?" Refit asked mildly, checking Griz's energy levels carefully as they slowly started to rise.

"Yeah, but he didn't have a nasty bot feeding him information to lure one of us in, even if it didn't end too well for him. So without help, Red gets the prize." Titan snickered a bit even as the forensic bot on his other couch started to stir online.

Griz raised one hand to his optics, shielding out the way too bright for him lights. "What's going on? Titan?"

"Stay still. Technically, you shouldn't be online at the moment. If you move too fast, you might spring another leak, because the new seals to your fuel pump have not set yet." The SPARTAN medic carefully pulled the older mech to a sitting position. "What can you recall?"

Raising an optic ridge at the little medic femme, the forensic mech looked around the Enforcer's living unit. "I recall that we were being attacked. Some mech pulled a blaster and aimed it at Wraith, but not too much after that."

"Was that the last time he was online?" Refit asked of the other two forensic bots.

Wraith nodded at her. "Coherently yeah. Now can you tell us what is going on?"

Refit simply smiled at him, nodding to the combat engineer to take over as she cleaned up. The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots leaned forward, to catch the three's attention. "I take it you've already heard of our unit, we're the ones stationed in different cities for defensive purposes."

"We've heard of some rumors, true." Griz told him, looking between the three 'siblings'. "I never knew how much to credit them, because there seemed to be no hard evidence to attest to the fact."

"Well… your staring at three of them, so I'd say it was conclusive." Titan pointed to the other SPARTANs as he ticked their names and roles off. "Refit, our battlefield medic. Galeforce, our second in command and our combat engineer."

"And you already know our anti-armor assault specialist." The green and gray mech put his brother in a helm lock to keep him silent. "He's assigned to Tyger Pax, me and 'fit are just visiting for medical reasons."

Jadelight looked between the three of them, from the tussling two mechs to the medic ignoring them. "How long have you been doing this?"

Refit answered her since the two mechs were a bit distracted trying to get a hold of each other.

"Since Kaon. The mech we had there was a bit distracted in trying to keep the old Prime alive, and that was the only reason he failed to prevent the Decepticon takeover." She blew out a sigh, watching rather fondly as her older brothers finished trying to one up each other and sat on the floor. "Done yet?"

"Kaon… so does that mean Vos too? You were in the city when it blew?" The light green painted femme questioned the medic as she started subspacing her tools.

"Well… yes, but Markmaker didn't make it out of the city." Refit winced at the mention of the seeker's city, coiling up the wires she had used to connect her monitoring devices to Titan's CPU. "We weren't here for Alithex or Kalis… or Tarn for that matter."

"Tarn?" Both SPARTAN mechs looked up at the medic, equally confused. Galeforce continued even as he levered himself into a sitting position next to Bumblebee, who had watched the pseudo fight go on with interest. "What about it?"

"Oh, that's right. I suppose you two don't really get around to talking to Shadow' at all that much, do you?"

"I try to avoid it if I can." Titan stated dryly as he got up, testing how his stabilizer responded now. "Why?"

"Well… we femmes tend to talk every now and again," Refit pointedly ignored the white and black Enforcer's snort at her statement, "not usually all at the same time, but when Shadow' and Ro' are talking, they tend to overlook if the rest of us are present when the XO started mentioning what she's doing in Gygax."

"And you've learned some dark, twisted secret about Tarn's past from what she's mentioned?"

The medic rolled her optics at the combat engineer. "No, just that Megatron probably ordered the city destroyed to cover something up. Shadow' hasn't found out what that something is yet, but she's sure she has something on the reason why."

As the conversation got more in depth over what this 'Shadow' femme did or did not say when talking to the other femme SPARTANs, the three forensic bots shared some lost looks of their own.

"I suppose that makes a bit of sense, really…" Jadelight mused thoughtfully, "I always wondered what had happened in Vos to create so few deactivations compared to the other cities attacked by the Decepticons."

"Considering the mech just single handedly rescued us out of our own labs, and the state some of those bots had been in, I would think you would be a little more concerned, Jade'." Wraith watched what seemed to be a gossip session taking place with more than just bemusement in his spark.

Griz's optic ridges furrowed as he raised one hand to check the hole in his armor. "What happened to them?"

"They were in _pieces_. A few looked like they violently met up with some of the office equipment, and some with our lab tools." The darker painted mech stated wryly, shooting a concerned look at the Autobot in the room. "One or two of them even looked deactivated because of the damages."

"Well… sorry for not noticing. I was a little more concerned by Griz's failing _fuel pump_ than the condition of the bots that assaulted us." Jadelight poked the mech squarely in the chest plates. "You're talking about _Titan_ 's brother, the one that voluntarily came to help us on nothing more than his brother's request. A polite 'thank you' wouldn't be out of place, Wraith."

"Aren't you even a little concerned over what they can do? Two were in _Kaon_ and _Vos_ when they were being attacked by Decepticons, and we just got a front row seat to what kind of damage they can cause."

"They can blow up a city." Refit helpfully piped up, turning to the three of them as Galeforce and Titan started discussing who they would prefer to work with if the option ever came up. "How do you think Markmaker stopped the Cons from hunting down and deactivating all the survivors from Vos?"

Wraith snapped his mouth components shut, wincing as he connected the designation to the deactivated list of Enforcers that came out of that explosion. "You all caused that?"

"We had no other options to take out many of the attackers as that one, and Mark' volunteered for it. His orders were to protect the city and its inhabitants at all costs," Refit jerked her thumb in Bumblebee's direction, who was still watching the two SPARTAN mechs in hope that another tussle would result, "just like how Ti's doing the same here. Do you have a problem with how your resident SPARTAN has conducted himself?"

Griz looked up at her, suddenly understanding the white and black mech's helpful personality. "Military programing; that would explain a lot."

"They're getting better with time."

"'They' are, not 'we' are?"

The medic blinked down at him, surprised at first but a small smile took over her lip plates after a moment. "You're a sharp one alright. Yes, they. Although I have the frame of a SPARTAN-Bot, I do not have the programming or training they do. They call me sister anyways, even though I'm actually the creation of one of them."

Griz took that all in with a thoughtful expression on his face plate. "How… did Titan end up with Bumblebee? He said once it was an order that had gone 'screwy' on him, but nothing more."

"Yeah, he would say that, wouldn't he?" Refit shook her helm in exasperation and went back to her tools. "It was a rather unusual series of events, to say the least. I'm sure you don't even know half the story already, seeing it's the reason why you ended up with Titan as your Enforcer liaison in the first place."

Jadelight blinked, watching the medic's back plates closely. "What do you mean by that?"

"Ask Titan."

The three forensic bots turned their helms to the Enforcer, who caught their looks and trailed off from what he had been talking to Galeforce about. "Ask Titan what?"

Galeforce replayed the conversation he had been kind of ignoring in his CPU, and grinned over at his brother. "How you got 'bee. That was the Mirror bot incident, right?"

The SPARTAN winced over the turn the conversation took. "Err… yeah."

Wraith whirled on the Enforcer with a cross expression. "You knew about that… that _bot_?"

"I know how he was deactivated, who did the deactivating, and I know who the fragger was working for. That's it." Titan shrugged, warily watching the forensic bots. "Everything else I learned from you three."

Griz tilted his helm at the Enforcer, curious despite himself. "What happened?"

"He was targeting them." Bumblebee helpfully chimed in, clambering off the couch to stand with his Guardian. "As Inkblot, he would visit the Youth Sectors in hope that gossiping younglings would force the SPARTANs to investigate. One of them did, and now the bot's no more and I live here."

Galeforce snickered even as Titan cuffed the youngling softly on the helm.

"Not quite how it all happened, 'bee. I was doing the career presentation for the Enforcers at your Youth Sector when you told me what Inkblot had been telling every other bot he could accost. Shadow' ordered an investigation, Trick' recalled the mech was supposed to be dead, talked to 'force about it, and…" Titan turned his optics to the ceiling, "I told Trick' and Sides that I didn't want to know. Then I got transferred. End of story."

"You left out the part where you got blackmailed by a youngling, the same one that just so happens to be standing on the couch next to you." The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots pointed out mock helpfully. "Or that you called in a seeker just so 'bee could meet one, or that you contacted Shadow' initially about paying his upgrade fees, or that-"

Galeforce ducked the swing the Enforcer aimed at his helm,

"-you damn near panicked when Shadow' told you to keep an optic on the scrap of metal just in case the Mirror bot knew which younglings had made contact with a SPARTAN and tried off lining him to cover his tracks."

"Alright! Gale', I'm ready to leave."

Refit loudly cut in before any more scuffles could break out.

"We're for Ankmoor, Ti'. Remember to turn in 'bee's medical checkup to the Youth Sector before they schedule him for another, and you," she turned to point a finger joint in Griz's direction, "need to remain seated or in a prone position for the next few joors. If any leaking or unexplainable loss of energy occurs, seek out your nearest medical station."

"Yes, ma'am."

The medic gave him a flat look. "Don't make me order Ti' to sit on you. I will."

The two SPARTAN mechs exchanged looks over the youngest femme's tone of vocalizer. Titan would later swear he heard overtones of Ratchet in her threat.

Griz finally nodded to her in acquiescence to her order, and the medic nodded back sharply and left the living unit with the Autobot in tow.

Once the two of them were gone, and Wraith had left with Titan's youngling for the Youth Sector, the lead forensic bot looked over to the SPARTAN Enforcer. "You haven't said who it was that Mirror bot was working for."

Titan winced again, rubbing his aching helm. Refit had woke him early as well, and ordered him to remain calm, which he promptly ignored in favor of wrestling with Galeforce so the medic didn't do anything for his processor ache. "Frag it all, mech. It was Shockwave… err… before Shadow' ripped the mech's helm off, that is."

Griz raised an optic ridge at the answer, and Jadelight snapped her helm to look at him from where she had wandered to see what selection of entertainment vids the Enforcer had in stock.

Said Enforcer rolled his optics at them. "Given the fact Shadow' has also punched _Ultra Magnus_ in the faceplate; it's not at all that surprising coming out of her."

The femme fidgeted with the case she had pulled out to look at. "The same Shadow' you contacted for 'bee's upgrade?"

"The one that lives in a Decepticon controlled Gygax with your brother Silentforce?" Griz added, even more curious over the Enforcer's sibling units now than he had been before.

"And the one who has a youngling of her own." Titan finished with a nod. "She's… kinda scary, actually."


	31. Chapter 31

With Titian and Bumblebee checked off her list of SPARTANs that needed medical checks, the two made their way to Ankmoor before the reporters in Tyger Pax could trace Galeforce to Titan.

Clearsight damn neared laughed in the 2IC's face plate for what had happened in the city when she got the story out of the green and gray mech, but her reboot at Refit's hands was unremarkable other than that she had a processor ache afterward just as the anti-armor assault specialist and the tactician had.

Although she laughed, Warcry wasn't as amused to learn of what happened.

Rumors about his unit were already popping up everywhere, and the incident with the forensic bots Titan worked with had only fanned the flames of the gossips all over Cybertron that were trying to puzzle it all out. He had Red Alert keeping on top of it, on how much was just rumor and how much was fact, but even the paranoid mech admitted there wasn't really a whole lot they could do to keep all of it from blowing wide open sometime soon.

Given that Red Alert knew more about how Cybertronian gossip networks worked than he did, Warcry was inclined to go along with the new Security Director's opinion. Broaching the topic with Shadowdancer accrued some interesting options for him.

The XO, who had some time free to report in as he requested after the Vos incident, actually suggested holding some sort of conference before it became common knowledge that there were SPARTANs lurking in most cities.

{ _All of it?_ }

{ _All of it._ } The Praxian femme agreed from half the planet away. { _We're already hitting the very edge of what we can do on our own, and although I predict the initial response to be rather… ugly, the reports of what actually happened in Vos… not so much Kaon, would do more to sway public opinion in favor of us rather than simply panic the bots we're trying to protect. We're not likely to have as much success with any of the other cities, and death has a way of making those that do not fight for a living pay more attention than just injuries. Especially since most Cybertronian injuries just require a joor with a medic to be fixed._ }

Warcry scowled in the direction the femme was in, knowing that she would be able to tell he was less than enthused with her idea even without her seeing his expression. { _Even the once human thing?_ }

{ _When else could you see telling the bulk of Cybertron what they're playing host to, or did you think we could do this forever even with the war in the way?_ }

{ _I was kinda hoping we would just assist in the background until the war was over, then fade into your shadows before any bot started asking awkward questions._ }

{ _That sounds nice, actually. I don't think it's an obtainable goal, though. If the war wasn't happening, we may have gotten away with that._ } She stated rather regretfully, sounding almost wistful over the idea. { _Think of the conference as a preemptive strike. Before it becomes an issue and the trustworthiness of the Autobots becomes questionable get on top of it, and tell only the truth when asked a question._ }

Warcry sighed, thinking over everything he saw that could go wrong, sure the femme he was talking to could see more than he could. { _Anything else to add before I go to the Prime with this?_ }

{ _Give me a warning before whatever is scheduled happens. I don't think there will be any problems, really, just… complications that will need to be dealt with on my end._ }

The pause caught the tank's attention, and as he started sorting through his information about the SPARTANs recorded on data pads, he questioned his third. { _What kind of complications?_ }

{ _You do recall where I'm living, correct? If you give out our device as a method of identifying the SPARTAN in a city, they'll clue in to your brief referring to me. One-four-four and the metallic twins should be safe enough, not many in Polyhex know what he is and what the twins are becoming._ }

{ _Are you safe enough with just three-three-seven there?_ }

{ _You forget who you're talking to. I have more 'loyal' defenders than you can shake a stick at, sir. They're rather annoying in their 'defense' of me, honestly._ }

Warcry laughed, he could just imagine the pout Shadowdancer would wear in the event she had to be defended by others.

Unfortunately, the femme caught onto part of the image since they weren't using Spotter's part of the link with the firewalls intended to keep that random processor leakage between bots out of the conversation happening. { _I saw that, zero-four-six. No, I do not pout. I glare._ }

He kept snickering even as the femme signed off the link abruptly, leaving him to wonder how to broach the topic with the Prime.

\V/

Soundwave reached her office as usual with his cassettes for their off-cycle meeting, what wasn't usual was that he launched straight into what he had learned that cycle at the Decepticon base. "Praxus: Confirmed target of next Raid lead by Megaton. Simfur: Requested target by raiding unit A005 two megacycles previous. Both Attacks: Approved."

Shadowdancer arched her optic ridges at the news. "Both of them? Damn. Something put a chunk of rebar up Megatron's exhaust port."

The Decepticon came to a stop in the middle of her office, inspecting the femme that seemed far too calm after hearing the news than she should be.

She grinned wickedly at him when it became apparent he was confused by something. "Praxus is defended by my best femme friend, who also just happens to be one of my best soldiers. Simfur has our demolitions specialist, and my frame brother. Those two don't particularly like fighting straight up battles helm to helm, like Silentforce or Markmaker did for the attacks on their cities. I'm not very concerned that Megatron's going to get his way in this bid as he did these last few times."

Interested despite knowing anything she gave away would be of little use to figuring out either her methods or her claimed 'siblings', the mech continued their interrupted normal routine by taking a seat before her desk for their usual game of chess, remaining silent in hopes she would inform him a bit more about her fellow SPARTANs.

She fulfilled his silent request by musing aloud on what she should tell her fellow soldiers as she set up the board. "Of course, Rook's going to need a bit of a helms up about Megatron himself visiting her, she'd be a little annoyed if I let it happen without at least informing her of that and we'd end up losing some bots if she doesn't know who to leave alive. Nitro… probably won't even need it. He's lived with both me and Trick', so he's a little used to unexpected occurrences popping up from time to time and trying to smack him in the face plate."

Soundwave could now place the femme mentioned, the gray one he had seen at their funeral rite in Vos, but the other Praxian he had only seen from afar. "Inquiry: Nitro."

"My… um…" The femme paused in assembling the pieces, blinking as she tried to phrase what the other Praxian was to her. "Back when the SPARTAN Three Program was started, me, Trick', and Nitro all were assigned to the same three unit training squad. We're the only _whole_ surviving training unit. The other's all lost one or two members, either just recently or way back when."

Once the board was set up, she pinned him with a more serious look.

"You'll be with Megatron in Praxus, right? Who do we have that's going to Simfur?"

"Assumption: Correct." Since she had given him silver, he moved one of his pawns to start the game. "Units of Note Comprising Assault Team 005: Constructicon Gestalt Units, Blackout, Barricade."

Shadowdancer's engine hummed as she moved her knight forward. "I'm still not all too sure about adding the Constructicons to our little insurrection. Are you sure about _all_ of them? I mean, I've got nothing against Bonecrusher, but I haven't gotten the measure of the rest of them yet."

Her comment was off-handed, but something about the manner it was poised caught his attention. Examining the femme across from him closely, he noted her chevrons were lit up, meaning she was in contact with a few of her sibling units at the moment. "Confidence of Gestalt Units' Agreement: High."

Her gold optics locked with his, and he had the feeling that something important was being decided. "Fine then. Starscream is going to be with you and Megatron in Praxus, right? Tell him and his flying acrobats to avoid the gray femme. He'll see what I mean when he gets there."

(ooo000ooo)

Shadowdancer contacted Rook first, on a private channel of the tactical uplink to keep it just between them. { _Feel like splitting yet?_ }

The saboteur's optics lit up, she had been recharging on Smokescreen's couch again, and the XO's words roused her up out of her light recharge cycle. { _Meaning?_ }

{ _It's been confirmed, your city's up next on the Con's target list with zero-two-seven. If you do zero-four-six and zero-one-five a favor, you can leave Praxus right after._ }

The once alien femme blinked up at the ceiling, considering the Praxian femme's words. She really had nothing left in the city to keep her there except any civil relations she had formed and wanted to keep.

Her ghetto dojo no longer needed her to keep it running, a few of the students she had taken on in a more personal level than the others were good enough to start teaching the classes themselves, and her defensive plan for the city was almost done. All that was left was a field test both for her students and her plan for the city.

The other goals and projects she had could wait a little bit before she got back to them.

Rook sat up, looking in the direction the Praxian brother's berth rooms were in. { _I'm as ready as I'll ever be, three-four-one._ }

Shadowdancer caught her hesitation and correctly deduced the reason behind it, not that it was any great stretch for her seeing as the two of them talked a bit more than any of the other SPARTANs assigned alone to a city. { _There is nothing that says you can't keep in contact, one-two-seven. Drop them a line every once in a while, or you can do what one-nine-six does and visit in base metals every now and again._ }

{ _True… is the CO and zero-one-five really going to think this is a favor?_ }

The saboteur had to grin at the wicked impulse that leaked through the uplink from the other femme, telling her that the XO was being evil again.

{ _Eventually. Probably not at first._ }

\V/

The Commander of the SPARTAN-Bot unit was late to the officer's meeting in Iacon, and since all of the bots assembled for it knew who and what Warcry was, they figured they had another problem on their hands.

Ratchet, there as the new CMO instead of the medic in charge of the city's medical facilities, was glaring a hole in the side of the Prime's helm. Optimus was trying to ignore his head medic's unease about the whole situation, given that his apprentice was out there with the SPARTANs instead of in the medical bays where she was supposed to be for the next two vorns at the very least.

Having struck up an inconsequential conversation with two other Autobot Heads of Tactical and Security, Ether was trying and failing to prevent himself from grinning gleefully at the prospect of learning more about what the SPARTANs had planned for any problems, while both Zeta and Kup were showing different amounts of the same concern that made the CMO try to glare his way to the Prime's CPU.

Ultra Magnus was drumming his finger joints on the table, causing his lieutenant to glare at the offending noise. Neither Xenon, there in Ratchet's old position as Head Medic of Iacon, Jazz, Prowl, nor Ironhide looked too worried; all of them firm in the belief that the SPARTANs would prevent any major disasters from happening.

Red Alert, who was still shadowing the Head of Security until the mech decided it was time to step down, was scouring the information nets for any possible reason the SPARTAN-Bot CO was late.

Warcry, once he finally made it into the underground meeting room, was a bit bemused to be the sole target of attention and on the receiving end of several expectant looks. He slowed to a stop near the foot of the table, looking from one face plate to the next. "Obviously, there's a bit of news from the other end of my networked soldier."

"It's Simfur being fragging attacked, right?" Ratchet rounded on Optimus, knowing full well that was were Refit was at the moment. "I told you one slagging guard bot was too few, Prime!"

"Uh… well…"

Prowl snapped his helm over, alarmed. "Praxus?"

It was the only other city they knew to be a possible target, and the one his own brothers were in.

Warcry rubbed the back of his helm, looking between the two mechs. "Actually… it's both cities. Shadow' thinks Megaton is trying to catch us off guard."

The Praxian shot to his pedes at the same time as Ratchet did to the chorus of the other bots shouting, " _Both_?"

The SPARTAN tank held out his hands to settle them down. "I've actually looked over Nitro's plans for Simfur; he's in no real trouble out there that he and Gale' can't get out of. Praxus was looked over by Shadowdancer, so all I really know is that Rook's starting her plan for the city at the moment. Rook did say that she was further than she thought she'd get with it."

Prowl drew himself up, frowning harder than Warcry had ever seen him do so before. "Are you _sure_ that Praxus is in no great danger?"

"Shadow's not too worried, and she knows all who's going where on the Decepticon end."

The Praxian was still frowning, but he seated himself without another word.

Optimus looked between his choice to replace Zeta in tactical and at his head medic, carefully nudging the tank to continue the report. "I take it you alerted the Enforcers in both cities?"

"Can't."

Even the Prime opened his mouth components to protest that, causing the SPARTAN to shake his helm at the renewed shouting in his direction.

" _LISTEN!_ We can't tell them without giving away who we learned it from." Warcry spoke calmly, returning the glares with a steady look of his own. "That'll cause Shadow' to lose what she's doing, and probably her spark. You can't give away that we have an informant on the Decepticon's High Command, we'll lose any further forewarnings of future attacks."

The dead silence was broken by Elita One, who just as carefully as the Prime asked, "We have an informant on the Con's High Command?"

The tank frowned at the shift of the conversation, but answered her as the rest of them thought through the logic he had just presented. "Yeah. I don't know exactly what Shadow's doing all the way out there, but I can guess."

"Guess." Optimus ordered firmly, a bit disturbed that Shadowdancer seemed to be much closer to the Decepticons that he had previously thought.

"When we were fighting in the human's rebellion, a common tactic in dealing with an overwhelming force when you only had a limited number of soldiers at hand was to split the opposing force using either a previously present fracture in the command structure or by creating an artificial one between the farthest opposing ideologists in the group." Warcry hesitated, wondering how the rest of it was going to be received of what he suspected his third was doing, then plowed on in a rush. "I believe she's trying to split the Cons into two different factions, and turn them on one another. Make the infighting weaken the Decepticons before any decisive battles need to be fought."

The silence lasted for all of two astroseconds as the bots assembled processed that. Both Zeta and Prowl turned to each other, ignoring that both Ultra Magnus and Kup did the same thing, trying to figure out how that would be possible from what they knew of the Decepticon faction. Jazz and Ether both continued to stare at the tank expectantly, interested to learn how the SPARTAN Praxian femme intended to do that.

Optimus leaned forward and planted his hands on the table, looking straight into Warcry's optics, ignoring every bot else. "Is she sure she can do that?"

"Shadowdancer is noted to be a psychological warfare specialist before she became a tactician." Red Alert spoke up before the SPARTAN CO could, passing his ever present data pad to the Prime to see the femme in question's file. "I suppose that was what she was intended to do before her classification changed in the event of the Covenant War starting and more tacticians were needed."

"From what both Shadowdancer and Silentforce have passed on to me, the fracture she took advantage of already existed before she started anything out there. It's already in the process of happening, she's just hurrying it on a bit so it won't take vorns to happen. I don't know what she's looking for in the bots she's gathering to the side of the fractured faction she's building, but I know it's already in force in both Gygax and Polyhex."

"I take it the reason you didn't tell us earlier is the same reason you gave for not informing either the government of Simfur or Praxus about the impending attacks." Optimus spoke, with an audible frown in his vocalizer even if half of his face plate was concealed with his battle mask.

Warcry nodded to the unspoken question of 'why' in the Prime's comment. "If the Cons Shadow's trying to turn find out you know about it before they joined up, they'll refuse out of principle. A lot of what we're doing with the Covert Ops relies on you not knowing until it happens, and you can't accidentally let loose a secret that you don't know."

"Dat don' 'xactly mesh, mech." Jazz pointed out before any of the other bots could speak up. "Yah let us know 'bout ya all, but not wha Shadow' n da others are doin?"

"There are already rumors about us, Jazz, even as far out as Tyger Pax. It had to start somewhere, and Iacon was the best bet since almost all the soldiers here know of us, if not about us."

As the conversation was derailed off on troop gossip and security measures, Prowl got up and pulled the tank to one side. "Masterful misdirection. I take it Shadowdancer assisted you in planning that out until it is far too late to forewarn the cities in question?"

Warcry grinned wryly at the touchy Praxian. "Yeah. That obvious, huh?"

Before the tactician could even speak up with the threat the tank was sure was in the front of his processors, he continued with what he was sure was his concern.

"Rook's already promised to lock your brothers in her dojo before the fighting begins. She said it is thanks for something that you helped her out with before she got out to the city and that she's sorry she can't keep an optic on them for you anymore."

\V/

Nitro suddenly frowned in the middle of exchanging shopkeeper gossip with Roulette, something odd enough on its own for the normally level processored Praxian, but it was also done in the middle of talking with the already suspicious of them Enforcer.

Axel nearly groaning in the process of restocking some of the minor components sold in the demolitions specialist's store.

The Praxian mech lifted his helm and stared off in direction of Gygax, telling the ex-bounty hunter exactly who he was talking to, before his optics locked with his own.

"Lock up, Ax'. We've got a little problem you already know about on its way." Nitro turned his attention to the very confused femme Enforcer looking between him and his assistant. "By my original orders, I'm supposed to corporate with the Enforcers in my assigned city in event of either a major catastrophe or an attack by either faction. You're going to want to see this."

The tan and black Praxian left the store front to Axel, motioning for the femme to follow him into the back.

Confused, and more than a little more suspicious of the two mechs now than she was a breem ago, she followed along, not really seeing a reason not to. At first the back rooms looked like a normal medical station and given that the mech did upgrades wasn't all too unusual; but there was another vaguely familiar mech, painted green and gray with an Autobot decal and faction symbol, and a panicked looking femme, painted opposite from the Praxian mech; near the back where the items and parts stored there looked less street legal and more like illegal weapon upgrades.

Ignoring the now alarmed Enforcer behind him, Nitro greeted his 2IC, who had been planning to leave the city shortly up until Shadowdancer contacted the CO over the uplink through Spotter, which meant that all of the SPARTANs had heard what was going on. "I take it you two heard?"

"Are you sure you know how to do that?" Galeforce questioned worriedly, confused over the XO's request of her old training squad member. "Leave some of them alive, that is."

"You mean we and I'm sure, Gale'. It's not that hard of a request, especially with the vid files attached just to make sure we don't kill the wrong ones." The Praxian gave the higher ranking SPARTAN a wry grin, turning to the worried medic that had only just finished his reboot earlier that cycle. "You're going to need to register with the medical centers as a visiting medic, 'fit. It'll give you something to do rather than worry stuck in here."

"No." The medic shot down that suggestion firmly. "You two may need my skills if an accident occurs, and if that happens it would be in the middle of the fight and I can't afford to be halfway across the city if you need me."

" _WHAT_ is going on here?" Roulette questioned loudly, if she was a bit hysterical at first, the three of them thankfully overlooked it.

Galeforce jerked his helm at the two of them, making them leave the back of the store and out into the streets as he dealt with the Enforcer. "You have a raiding party of Cons about to knock on your walls. I'm going to guess they're not going to do so politely. Nitro was assigned Simfur as his city to defend in event of any problem, and we're going to classify this as a problem."

The Enforcer had opened her mouth components to protest the leave taking of the shopkeeper, but snapped them closed when his words penetrated her CPU. She was still staring at him in something similar to horror when the Nitro's assistant wandered in, snickering at her expression and tossing something to the other mech.

"Store's locked up. I'm holding the fort, so shoot a few for me."

Galeforce saluted the mech, snatching what had been tossed at him out of the air and turning on a heel stabilizer to leave himself and lock the door behind him before the Enforcer could gather enough of her scattered circuits to protest anything that had gone on so far.

Axel sighed, patting the femme on the back as he passed her to where the weapons were stacked up. "Don't think about it too hard. If you do, you start asking questions."

Roulette whirled on him, turning angry at her inability to make any sense of what had just happened. "How would you know?"

"Cause I was where you were once and I asked some questions that I really wish I had never asked." The ex-bounty hunter picked up a rather well-crafted rifle that had migrated somehow in the recycle pile in the back of the store. "Why the slag was this placed back here?"

Taken aback at both the blunt reply to her question and the obviously rhetorical one he posed aloud, the Enforcer hesitated and switched tracks from being angry to inquiring why there were illegal weapons in the back of the store. "What… what is that all supposed to be?"

"Junk really. Badly installed or maintained weapon systems a few bots got in a panic, and then had to get uninstalled when they started causing conflicting errors in their programming. Nitro uninstalls them for a small fee and disposes of them every now and again." Checking the part against the list posted in the back so the Praxian could keep track of all he had, the mech frowned irritably. "Oh. Targeting software is slagged. Go figure. Eh… scope's still usable."

The mech motioned for her to follow again, leading the way up to the living unit above the store.

Roulette only followed since she was sure all of the exits had been closed off already, intending to demand that the shop assistant release her after she got a few questions answered. "How does Nitro get rid of all that?"

"By sending them to Galeforce, the mech you just saw downstairs." He spoke over his shoulder plates to her as he scaled the stairwell, the broken rifle over his opposite side. "Gale' fixes them up and sends them on to Rook in Praxus. Ro' then takes them and teaches some of the bum bots there how to use them, building up a defensive force out of the bots she finds in the slums for her assigned city. Praxus practically has a full army because of these two."

The Enforcer scowled, trying hard to find some law that made what had gone on illegal, but was coming up blank. As long as the weapons weren't sold the city of Simfur didn't care what happened to weapons uninstalled from foolish bots, and sending them off to be fixed and transported to another city wasn't something the council had thought up as a method around the laws against selling the weapons in the first place. "How the frag did they get them from here to Praxus?"

"Holdout, their supply office in Central, who happens to help out the Autobots there with their supply routes." Axel pushed open the door to the roof of the building, letting the femme see his grin. "They're all over the place, really. There are even a few in Decepticon held cities, which is how the bots here knew about this attack."

Roulette nearly missed the last step up in surprise. "There really is an attack about to happen? Then why the slag did you lock me the _frag_ in for? I need to-"

"Settle down." Axel grinned dryly in her direction, and held out the rifle to her. "You can't tell your commanders, how would you say you learned of it? From a theoretical soldier from a unit that technically doesn't exist in the Autobot ranks yet? The SPARTANs are going to handle it, so just calm down and watch."

Stalled on that very issue of reporting, and trying hard to figure out what she was supposed to do with that information without being ordered in for a comprehensive CPU check, the femme took the broken rifle carefully and pointed the scope in the direction the mech helpfully pointed out for her.

\V/

Rook had been missing since Smokescreen onlined for the cycle, making the Enforcer slightly worried what the saboteur was up to. She normally, when she wandered over if she noticed the bots tailing her again, waited at least long enough to greet him and Blue first before leaving the living unit.

Her missing presence had alarmed both Praxians, so when the SPARTAN femme sent the both of them a transmission just before they were due to meet up with her at their usual bar with Blaster and his cassettes they didn't question her request that they venture over to her dojo to pick her up.

Irritated but not surprised that the femme had the both of them jumping through hoops for her, Smokescreen lead his brother into the converted warehouse as the merchant called out for the femme. "Rook?"

The clang of the security system bolting the doors closed behind them made the brothers jump, and a number of other security options the femme had installed in the warehouse since she acquired it from Bluestreak also activated as the SPARTAN herself came down the stairs. "Damn, mechs. Cutting it a little close, aren't we?"

"Rook, what's going on?" Smokescreen looked from the ex-alien femme to the barred doors, confused. Something was telling him this all was wrong, not just the activation of the security system.

"Praxus is about to be attacked." Reaching the ground floor, she smiled apologetically at them. "And I'm really sorry for this, but I owe Prowl a Pit of a favor."

"Wha-?" The Enforcer's optics suddenly unfocused on him, blurring the outline of the gray femme, making her blend into the shadows of the poorly lit warehouse. "Ro-?"

Bluestreak sank to the floor first, rendered temporarily offline by the self-destructing virus the SPARTAN had added to the message she sent both of them. Smokescreen held out a bit longer, sending the femme a torqued glare as he too was knocked offline.

Rook sighed, walking over to lift the both of them up to put in her guest room until the virus wore off. She was nearly sure Smokey would stop talking to her because of this.

\V/

Roulette peered through the scope of the broken rifle, zooming in over the far section of the wall visible from the roof of the building the Praxian merchant lived and worked in. "What is it that I'm looking for?"

"The recently moved piles of dirt. The ones that seem to litter the ground out there."

Catching sight of what the Praxian's shop assistant wanted her to see, the Enforcer backed the scope out to see more of the ground outside of the city. "So there are more of them than… why are there so many of them?"

She could spot at least four next to the main highway, and she was sure there were more than she could catch in the limited view she had with the broken rifle.

"They're bombs." Axel gave her a level look when she nearly dropped the weapon, shocked from helm to pedes all over again. "Nitro's their demolition specialist. What did you think he would do to defend the city?"

"I… I wouldn't have guessed… is-is he going to blow up the city?"

The violently green and blue painted mech laughed at her shaky question. "Naw, they're not for the city. They're for whoever tries to use a different way into the walls than the front gates. Nitro can trigger any one of them remotely, and set them to explode if any bot steps on them. He won't do it until he manages to get off a warning shot, but the option's there."

Roulette let herself fall back until she was sitting next to the mech. "Oh Primus… how in the Pit did he get all this set up without us knowing?"

"He didn't. One of the first things he did was register as a war built with your Enforcers, had the Prime himself, Optimus not Sentinel, vouch for him so they'd keep it quiet. Your higher ups know all about him, and I mean the ones that reside in the government district not the Station Chiefs or any bot lower on the totem pole than that." Axel looked out to where he knew the SPARTAN-Bots were setting up their 2IC to be the first bot the attacking group of Decepticons saw. "Don't feel bad about being shocked, I nearly crashed when he came clean to me a couple of stellar cycles ago. I still have incidents now and again, when he tells me what's going on with the other SPARTANs."

She ran a hand over her mouth plates, processing what she knew from rumors against what the mech next to her was telling her. "Then they really did keep the seekers functioning single handedly? I thought that was just an Autobot rumor spread around to keep up morale."

"Nope. Markmaker, their old Second in Command, was stationed in Vos. When the attack hit, he was supposed to be getting a transfer up north to Tyger Pax through the regular Enforcer channels. Instead, he volunteered to be a living bomb so the civilians would have enough time to get away from the Cons before they could be killed."

"Sargent Markmaker?" Roulette ran her CPU over the mech's file in the Enforcer's network, also running a search for any other bots that joined the ranks of the Enforcers around the same time. "He looks like a tank."

"He was a tank." He corrected with a dry grin. "It was a bit before my time, so I only really met him once, but the mech was an… _interesting_ bot to talk to."

"What do you mean?"

"After getting to know a SPARTAN and their mannerisms, you can just tell who is and who isn't a SPARTAN. They all react rather strangely to some things you normally wouldn't process twice about. But Markmaker was better adjusted to whatever the slag happened to them, and the only time I ever talked to him he grinned at me and slapped me rather hard on the back as he said 'Welcome to the freak show, you're never leaving us now'." His dry grin turned into a wryly exasperated smirk. "He was right. Once they have a use for you, you keep finding something or some reason to stay just to see how the rest of this fragging train wreck ends."

Something about his statement tripped her Enforcer programming, and she took a closer look at the mech sharing the roof with her. "You… you were the other bot, the bot with Copper when he tried attacking the Praxian…"

"Unfortunately, yeah." Axel warily regarded the femme, internally wincing as she connected the dots mentally. "We were hired to either offline or sparknap him, whichever was more possible. However, Nitro was better than the both of us put together and caught me before I could get the frag out of there with my sanity intact."

"I should arrest you." Roulette glared at him. "Do you know how hard we've been looking for your aft?"

"Wasn't like I was anywhere nice, femme. Nitro kept me locked up in the basement, not in some cushy apartment in another city."

Her engine choked, echoed by a distant explosion from the direction they were looking out in.

Holding one hand to her spark chamber, the femme changed the topic mainly out of alarm of the impending fight she wouldn't be able to participate in. "What was that?"

"Warning shot. The only one the Cons will get." Axel got up on his pedes, snatching up the broken rifle that had fallen to the Enforcer's lap. "That means they're in Nitro's sights, and about a few breems from the city's gates."

\V/

Soundwave took in the sight of the city Megatron wanted destroyed, glittering in the horizon just before the cycle was due to start over. The Helix Gardens could be seen from where he was, the great crystals slowly revolving in the methane gasses that kept them afloat.

He wasn't just out there to keep an optic on the city, and to inform Lord Megatron when the residents noticed the rather large encampment of Decepticons just on the other side of the basin the city sat on, but also to get some space to think through what Shadowdancer had told him just before he had left.

"Rook won't be pulling any punches. She can't, not with what she has to work with." The Praxian femme had informed him the cycle before he left the city, oddly serious instead of with her usual smirk. "I've asked her to avoid you, the cassettes, and the seekers, but that won't mean you'll get out of there without any damages. Remember, Rook's a saboteur. She's not trained to take on an opposing force helm on, she's more likely to sneak around and stab you in the back. So if in doubt, get the frag out of there."

It had, of course, taken some fancy verbal maneuvering to keep the reason the tactician knew where the raiding party was going from the Decepticon High Commander but Soundwave had managed it, also giving what little the femme wanted revealed to the massive silver mech about the SPARTAN in residence of their target city.

Now looking over the city the SPARTAN's saboteur used as a home base, the communications officer was even more uneasy about this attack than he had been back in Gygax. He had more time to process the warning the black and blue femme had given him and what that vague warning meant to him and the bots with him.

Soundwave had known, when the femme had revealed what she was to him, that he may end up fighting some of her sibling units and that it may damage some of the rapport she had with him if he caused any of them damage, or they might even damage him if he wasn't careful given what the smallest femme in the unit could do to an unwary bot without even an astrosecond of warning.

Megatron had claimed the city stood in the way of the Decepticon's ideas, but with what the mech knew now he highly doubted it. Given what Shadowdancer had on the city, that she had let him see the same joor she warned him of what he would be going up against; Praxus was more Decepticon sympathetic than most of the other still Neutral cities like how Crystal city was more aligned with the Autobots.

They particularly didn't like advertising that fact, which was how the Decepticon High Commander was slipping this all past them, bout Soundwave couldn't see a reason behind the attack other than destroying a city that might possibly be thinking of aiding the Autobots, and even that was unlikely to happen.

He had asked the Praxian femme back in Gygax, but she had just shaken her helm and shrugged to say she didn't know.

The crunch of gravel under pede alerted him some bot was approaching his sentry post, and he turned his helm to the side to see the massive silver mech in question approaching where he was standing. "Anything to report, Soundwave?"

"Negative, Lord Megatron. Suspicious activity: Minimal."

Nodding to him, the bigger mech passed to check on the next sentry post, leaving the communications officer to his thoughts again.

After about a joor of watching the city, his sensitive audio receptors picked up the sound of shifting gravel again, this time from in front of him. Carefully scanning the area before him, no great feat seeing as it was mostly level ground, a hidden bot spoke to him. "So you're Soundwave, huh?"

He scowled, scanning the area the vocalizer had sounded from more minutely for the owner of that vocalizer.

"You won't be able to see me unless I want you to, so give it a rest. I just wanted to meet you properly first." The femme dropped whatever was keeping her from his sensors, flickering into view with a smirk. "I'm Rook. The SPARTAN assigned to the city over there."

Blinking at her, Soundwave inclined his helm to her politely, unsure of how else to treat the femme that happened to be both his faction's opponent in the upcoming fight as well as the sister of a friend. "Inquiry: Unit Shadowdancer's ability to evade detection."

"Same as mine, really." The gray painted femme was still smirking as she shrugged. "I never really got the opportunity to talk to you in what was left of Vos, seeing as I was a bit rushed with my own mechs and Trick'. But the question I have for you is this, what are your intentions towards my younger sister?"

"Unit Orpheus: Extended invitation to Vos."

Rook waved that away with one hand.

"That really doesn't mean much, because there really wasn't a reason for you to follow along even with the orders handed to you to stick close to the femme." Her smirk widened to a grin when he couldn't protest that. "In my experiences with situations like this, you either want one of two things. Care to guess what?"

The Decepticon scowled at her again from behind his battle mask, nettled at the femme's assumptions of his character.

She ticked a finger joint back and forth in front of his face plate. "Don't even give me that. Shadow' may be a little dense when it comes to personal relations, but I've had a few more vorns of experience with it. Fess up. I'll even bribe you a bit. Did you know Shadow' was rather worried when Orph' extended that invitation? She was worrying the problem around in that fine-tuned processor of hers the entire time it took you to get up to us in Vos."

Soundwave studied the femme; unsure of what it was he was supposed to say to that. "Issued Request: Clarify."

"What are you after with Shadow'?"

Rook rolled her optics when the mech hesitated again.

"You know she only thinks you hang around because of what she's promised you, right?" He stiffened, and she took that in with interest. "You didn't? Huh. Told you Shadow's kinda dense."

"Likelihood of statement being true: Minimal."

"Whatever mech. I've known her longer than you have."

Shutting down his optics, the Decepticon communications officer futilely whished he was back in Gygax, at least there things made sense. When he onlined his optics again, the femme was gone, at least from his sight.

\V/

Nitro triggered another mine to explode, under some outriders of the attacking Decepticon force that had wandered a bit too far off the main highway. "How many times do you think that has to happen before they learn?"

"What, are you getting tired of blowing slag up?" Galeforce raised his optics to the sky even as he tuned slightly to target another group in his rifle's scope. "Hallelujah, it's a fragging miracle."

"Blowing up stationary objects is one thing. Blowing up living bots is another, especially when they leave parts behind." The Praxian mech grimaced as he took in the already energon and oil splattered highway, and the shattered frames he and the 2IC had built up between them. "At least it's not red…"

Refit, who had taken a seat next to a low wall the other two were using as cover, looked up to the demolitions specialist. "Are you Hemophobic, Nitro?"

"No." Nitro ignored the snicker Galeforce gave to the ex-AI's question, turning a frown onto the medic. "No SPARTAN has a phobia, 'fit. It's just I've seen enough red to last the rest of my function."

"Watch it." The Praxian jerked at the combat engineer's warning, making the sniper round fired at him miss by bare inches.

Galeforce scowled as he crouched down. "My rifle won't reach that far, what do you have, Nitro?"

"An M6, same as you, _sir._ " The tan and gray mech grinned at the sour look the 2IC gave him for that. "But I've got more than enough explosives left out there. Give me a moment."

(ooo000ooo)

Barricade winced as yet another land mine went off and took out another chunk of the tagger on bots that had followed his strike team out of Gygax's territory.

The slagging idiots always traveled along whenever a large group of actual Decepticons when out of the city, slinking through the cracks of the blockade intended to keep that sort of thing from happening, and he had never really given them a second thought before Shadowdancer turned his CPU inside out.

Blackout, the only other mech with his group that knew what he did, squeezed off a shot with the sniper rifle he had picked for this mission. "Frag it all, what _are_ they! I can't even hit the slagging junkyard rejects."

"Maybe they're SPARTANs too, like your bartender femme." Bonecrusher offered idly from the other side of the recon helicopter, smirking as yet another explosion took out a grouping of mechs a few hundred feet before the three of them. "Would explain a few fragging things."

The two mechs who knew some of what that actually meant exchanged a look, then turned back to where two lone mechs were stalling the whole raid.

The ex-military mech rubbed the back of his helm even as another few bots farther ahead got shot through some critically required part for functioning. "That would make some sense, I never did get where all her sibling units were from that femme."

"So now what?" The helicopter asked irritably as he swung himself down off the outcropping of rock he had tried to snipe on. "We're stuck here if none of these cowards will press forward, and I highly doubt we will do better than these tin plated bots have in trying to get to the city walls."

Bonecrusher grinned as he turned around and headed for his gestalt teammates. "I've got an idea."

(ooo000ooo)

Both Galeforce and Nitro lowered their rifles as Devastator took form on the horizon, staring as the largest mech they had ever seen formed up before their optics. "Well, that's… unusual."

"It's a gestalt form. Made out of a number of smaller bots." Refit offered from the side, looking over the small wall to where the two of them were staring. "Isn't that one of the units Shadow' asked you not to damage too much?"

Galeforce laughed incredulously. "How the frag are we going to do that without letting that thing stomp all over Simfur?"

"I… may have an idea." Nitro stated slowly as he tilted his helm to see the massive assemblage of bots headed its way to them. "I'm going to need some serious cover for it to work, though."

Refit reached up a hand for his rifle. "I'll help."

"Are you sure, 'fit?" The demolitions specialist asked even as he handed over the weapon. "You don't have to, I'm sure Gale'll be enough to cover what I'm about to do."

"I'm sure. Besides, nothing says I actually have to hit them. I can just shoot in their direction, right?"

The gestalt bot in the distance roared, and the wind picked up. Galeforce frowned, as that had never happened before on Cybertron to his knowledge with the thin atmosphere, then cursed and dragged the other two behind the low wall they were couched behind. "Stay down!"

The brisk breeze turned into a roaring wind as the compound bot sucked up everything it could, the frames of the deactivated bots, a number of Nitro's land mines, a good portion of the loose sand that made up the ground, and everything in range that wasn't bolted down.

The Praxian cursed and tightened his grip on both the wall and the medic, who had clutched the borrowed rifle in her hands when Galeforce pulled them down. He had to shout to be heard over the roaring winds. "It's a good thing I built those to be sturdy!"

"I don't know, Nitro! It's grinding everything to dust!"

Even as the 2IC shouted what he was watching to the other two, the massive bot seemed to choke on something, causing the wind to cut down significantly.

The Praxian clapped the other mech on the shoulder, then jumped over the low wall and bolted flat out for the gigantic bot in the distance. Galeforce bit out a few choice curses as he lifted his rifle to cover the other SPARTAN's door-wings, mostly directed to the peculiar habits of SPARTAN Praxians. Giggling, Refit also aimed the tan and gray mech's rifle in the distance and emptied the clip in the general direction of where the combat engineer was shooting.

(ooo000ooo)

Blackout swore as Devastator choked, and again as movement in the distance caught his optics. "Well, we got a fragging response, but I don't think it was the kind we wanted."

"That bot's either suicidal or insane." Barricade stated as he shouldered his own weapon in the direction of the tan and gray blur headed their way. "What the slag does it think it can do alone?"

Opening his mouth components to answer the military mech, the helicopter felt his own engine choke as the blur got even faster than he thought possible.

(ooo000ooo)

Nitro gritted his dental plates as his systems started complaining about the speed he was cranking out in response to return fire to Galeforce and Refit's renewed volley of electron rounds barreling past him. Ignoring the stress he was putting on his own frame, the demolitions specialist sped up even more and added a slightly wavering motion to his run to throw off any bots aiming at him.

Luckily for him, the gestalt bot had advanced as it was sucking up everything it could, and was slightly before the line of Decepticons trying to attack his assigned city. Even as a few shots pinged off his personal full frame shielding, he reached the pedes of the massive bot. As the Decepticons started shooting their own mech trying to hit him, the Praxian used his SPARTAN-Bot advantages to jump more than climb up the massive gestalt bot, reaching the spot he had observed the bots that made up the gigantic frame fit together.

"Right, bot." Nitro told the gestalt bot he was on even as he readied an explosive in his hand. "This is going to hurt you more than me, but _damn_ is it going to hurt."

Swinging his fist back, the Praxian punched as hard as he could into the bot's armor plating.

He kept hold of his own explosive, even as it detonated and flung some of the gestalt bots apart, and him backwards into empty air.

\V/

Megatron advanced on the main gates of Praxus, smirking darkly as the very image of the Decepticon High Commander sent all of the civilian bots out on the streets running for safety.

Soundwave followed along in the larger mech's wake, having already deployed his cassettes to keep an optic on the streets the main force couldn't see from the path they had picked to advance into the city, glancing up to the seekers over helm every now and again.

They saw next to no resistance until they started marching on the government district of the city, where the on duty Enforcers had hurriedly gathered to put up a show of resistance. All and all, they massed less than two hundred bots, a third of the force Megatron had with him.

Slowing to a stop, the warlord of the Decepticons planted his pedes firmly in the middle of the road and widened his smirk. "Is this it? I expected better from Praxus."

"Depends on what you mean by better, mech." The familiar vocalizer made the communications officer stiffen in surprise, identifying it from earlier in the cycle when Rook had paid him a visit. The femme herself flickered into view right before the silver mech stepping up until she was nearly pede to pede with him. "The Enforcers aren't the only bots here."

Megatron narrowed his optics on the femme, casting a glance to her armor plate, where a familiar symbol had been painted. "And you are?"

She took one step back with her left pede, sweeping him a bow that forcibly reminded the mech of the SPARTAN-Bot's assassin.

"I am known at the moment as Rook. Number one-two-seven of the class two SPARTANs, Covert Ops saboteur specialist. And," she added as she straightened up, "the SPARTAN-Bot assigned to defend Praxus from hostile takeover."

There must have been some reporters in the group with the Enforcers behind her, for her comment raised a number of excited comments from the assembled bots. Megatron gritted his dental plates together, vastly annoyed at the smaller femme's show of bravo. "You and what army?"

She _grinned_ into his faceplate as she spread her arms wide. "Why, _this_ one."

The clicking of weapons being armed or ammo being loaded echoed around the street, and bots that hadn't been there before appeared on the roofs aiming a number of different weapons in the Decepticon's direction.

There were nearly four hundred bots that Rook had managed to train in warfare in secret, all of them bots that had no prospects for an honest function before she found them and gave them a purpose. They ranged from the bums that had their job classes rendered obsolete, to clerks and other low class bots that had become dissatisfied with their jobs, to even a few straight out criminals that wanted a different function, not necessarily a more honest one.

Each of them was armed with a weapon that had been rebuilt by the SPARTAN-Bots' combat engineer to be significantly more powerful than anything available to regular civilians, and had been taught how to use them by a femme that had seen more war than they could comprehend.

The defenders of Praxus now had enough numbers to go pede to pede with the Cons, and they knew it.

Rook's grin turned as dark as the Decepticon's leader's had been when he entered the city. "Any questions?"

In a rage, Megatron swung a heavy fist at her faceplate, scowling even harder as he missed when the femme did a backflip to avoid the hit.

The femme landed on a knee joint, turning her helm to the left and shouting her order before the warlord could aim a weapon in her direction, " _Now,_ Jackknife!"

A red and gold mech stationed with the left side of the defenders the saboteur had assembled pointed in the Cons' direction and shouted himself, " _Fire!_ "

At that point, it became too confusing for Soundwave to keep an optic on everything going on. The mech backed up even as the Decepticon that had advanced to stand next to him went down with a number of shots to the helm.

The first volley was the only one the defenders of Praxus had to aim with, and as Rook had taught them they used it wisely and picked lighter armored targets that would go down in one shot, not seven. Megatron was the only mech in the attacking force that got away without some graze or shot through the armor impairing him.

Soundwave clutched the wound that had rendered his left shoulder joint unresponsive, watching as the mighty mech that lead the Decepticon went after the femme that dared to damn near laugh in his faceplate, only to swing his helm around in confusion as she faded from view before he could close in on her.

A screech from above drew his attention that the seekers themselves hadn't been spared from the initial attack, as two of the flyers dipped dangerously low when holes appeared in both their wing plates and thrusters.

The shock of the suddenly appearing bots wore off in the next few moments, and the surviving Cons rushed both the buildings the bots the SPARTAN had assembled were on as well as the flimsy barricade the Enforcers had thrown up with their limited forewarning from the civilians.

However, the street Rook had chosen to confront the Cons on had done the damage it was intended to even if the Enforcers didn't know why they had gathered in that spot. It was basically a kill box, where nothing could move or even face their attackers without exposing itself to the concentrated fire from above and the shooters had a clear view of everything on the street.

The Enforcers belatedly moved forward to join the pseudo military force they found themselves working with but they were beaten to it when some of the Con's helms started popping off, coating a nearly invisible femme's hands with glowing energon and slick black oil.

Rook moved through the panicking Decepticon force like the grim reaper of her former race, using her finally fully released strength and speed to deftly avoid nearly everything thrown in her direction. A few hits scored on her, both from the Cons and her own bots as the fighting got even more confusing as panic set in, but the shots that managed to penetrate her armor were all mild in comparison to the damage she was doing.

Megatron zeroed in on her as some of her outline was shown through the spilled fluids of his own faction's soldiers, pushing and flat out stomping on the bots that got in his way. Rook saw him coming, and used his rage to impair or destroy even more of his own force as she played keep away with her own frame.

Soundwave scowled at the destruction happening at their leader's hands, or rather pedes, as Megatron crashed through his own ranks after one lone soldier. As Starscream gave up on the fight and ordered his seekers away from the city before one of them was deactivated and landed close by, the communications officer was already making his way to the nearly berserk Decepticon High Commander even if his frame was shot up even more. "Situation: Unexpected! Recommendation: Retreat!"

" _Decepticons do not retreat!_ " The massive silver mech roared, swinging at the femme that danced just out of his reach. He wanted to pull her apart himself, piece by piece, just because she defied him.

The reason she had gotten so close was apparent to both mechs when she flickered back to view, pulling a rifle out of her subspace and aimed it at the warlord's helm. Soundwave reached out with his right and pushed the Decepticon leader out of the way, taking the shot on his right wrist joint and wincing as it shattered. He heard the quiet mutter of a foreign sounding curse even as the report of the rifle and his narrow escape finally got through to Megatron that he was losing, badly.

The High Commander contradicted his own words when he turned his helm and shouted, " _Retreat!_ " at his soldiers, even as a few more bots started shooting in his direction.

(ooo000ooo)

Rook slunk back into the growing shadows as the Decepticons turned tail and ran, frowning darkly.

She hadn't meant to shoot Soundwave, and she was certain that Shadowdancer would have some choice words for her once she reached Gygax.

Sighing silently, the saboteur subspaced her M392 rifle and snuck off before the reporters she had tipped off actually got the courage to try and find her now that the Cons were on the way out of the city at a fast clip. She knew her pseudo soldiers wouldn't let up until they were farther than they could shoot, it was what she had taught them after all, so it was safe to tidy up the last few loose ends she had in the city.

They knew enough rumors about her to keep the gossip network of Cybertron happy for at least a megacycle or two.

Sneaking past the Enforcers, who were milling around trying to round up all of her old students to find out what the frag had just happened, the femme dropped down into the underground tunnels to quickly travel back to her dojo.

Jackknife was waiting for her, scowling himself in her direction when he caught sight of the fluid splattered femme. "There were a few just a little major things you left out, wasn't there?"

"Obviously." Rook snorted at him, not even slowing down when the mech fell in step with her. "There was a lot I couldn't say, security reasons don't cha know."

"Yeah but… _one-two-seven?_ "

"My SPARTAN roster number. I was the one hundredth and twenty seventh candidate for the SPARTAN class two program."

"So now what?"

The femme stopped in her tracks, setting her curious orange optics on him. "I'm leaving."

"WHAT?"

She smiled grimly at him. "I have to go… whole the city knows about me, and it's really only a matter of time until they demand that I leave. The only problem is I can't leave looking like this."

Jackknife set that issue on a back burner, staring hard at the femme that had worked hard to convince him to leave the thief lord he had once worked for. "Where are you going? What's going to happen to the dojo? Rook, you can't leave yet."

"The dojo will be fine, Bluestreak now owns it. I transferred the deed earlier this cycle, and I have a number of students set up to continue teaching once I'm gone."

He glared at her, crossing his arms over his chassis. "So, where are you going?"

She just tapped her finger joint to her lip plates with a small smile, continuing on her way and leaving him behind.

Cautiously approaching her own ghetto dojo she was happy to see that the reporters hadn't made it that far out there yet, or hadn't learned where she had spent the last vorn and a half in the city. Commanding the security system to unlock, Rook was nearly jumped by both Praxian brothers that she had secured inside late last cycle.

"ROOK! What the slag did you do?"

"What I was ordered to do. I take it you were watching the news vids?" The saboteur asked cheerfully as she passed both brothers on her way to her room.

Smokescreen followed after her, intent on giving her a piece of his processor for her little stunt. "I meant with the virus, you slagging sneak!"

Ignoring the question for the moment, the SPARTAN let them all into her room and snatched up a synthetic rag to wipe the worst of the spilled fluids on her frame off. "Blue, you now own the dojo, keep it running for me, will you?"

The comment and question caught both Praxians off guard, and the merchant, who was a little upset at the femme, cautiously asked, "Why?"

"Why do you own it, or why do you need to keep it running?" Rook flashed them a weak grin as she inspected her paint job, flaking some of it off. She was due for another one anyways. "Because I'm about to leave Praxus, Blue."

Watching worriedly as the femme broke open one of her drawers built into the frame of her berth, Bluestreak waved his hands before him in a panic. "Rook, I'm not really that upset! I promise I'm not! Please don't leave!"

The SPARTAN grabbed a few containers out of the drawer, shaking her helm at him. "It's not that, Blue. I've blown my cover keeping Smokey's fellow Enforcers alive. Besides, Shadow' needs my help, so I was due to leave the city soon anyways."

Smokescreen hesitated as the femme left her berth room, looking from the saboteur's back plates to his own brother.

Really, he wasn't that upset either. He had gotten orders to remain where he was once the Enforcers had clued in on to the attacking force of Decepticons storming the gates. Although he had been annoyed that she had pulled that one over him, he wasn't mad.

He bolted after her, skidding to a halt on the ground floor when it became apparent that the femme was in the wash racks.

Bluestreak slunk down the stairs, pouting as he sat on the last step.

Blaster ran to the dojo not even a joor later, skidding to a halt when he saw both Smokescreen and Bluestreak in the SPARTAN's dojo. "Did you see that?"

"See what?"

"Ro's got a couple hundred bots she turned into a militia force for Praxus!" The communications expert wheezed out, his engine running hot after bolting from the street where Rook had attacked the Cons on to her dojo. "They just kicked some serious Decepticon aft!"

The merchant's helm shot up even as his brother swung around to face the mech as he released his cassettes from his chest compartment. "What?"

"They're about to slather it all over the news vids, she did this really wicked introduction… right to Megatron's faceplate and everything." Blaster grimaced as the less interesting parts of that fight came to the forefront of his CPU. "They're also about to start a seriously massive bot hunt for a gray painted femme calling herself Rook, she's wanted for questioning."

"That's not going to happen." A freshly repainted femme remarked as she left the wash racks. The SPARTAN femme was now sporting a black and gold paint job, and the symbol from her left arm armor plate was missing. "There isn't a Rook anymore. Hi mechs, my designation is Cinder."

Eject whistled at her, causing her to smirk at him.

"And I've got to go. It's been fun, bots." Cinder added as she saluted them on her way past Blaster and Steeljaw.

The communications expert raised an optic ridge at her back plates even as his partner bolted past him hot on her trail. Blaster looked over to the depressed looking Bluestreak on the dojo's stairs. "Is that true?"

"She's leaving the city, yeah." The merchant responded, more than a little depressed about how that cycle had gone. "She left me the dojo, and said one of her sisters needs her help, so she was planning on leaving the city anyways."

"Damn… Onyx is going to be torqued."

(ooo000ooo)

Smokescreen caught up to Cinder before she reached the grill for the underground tunnels. "Ro- _Cinder_ , wait!"

"If you're going to yell some more, I don't want to hear it. I'm sorry, okay? Really. But-"

"Shut up." The femme turned to him, confused, and he took the opportunity to grab her and kiss her. "Be careful, will you? I know how you are; you may just end up annoying a bot to commit murder out of desperation."

The SPARTAN numbered 127, who had been badgering the mech before her for most of their vorn and a half long acquaintance, blinked in shock at him. "Well… I… _what_?"

The Enforcer grinned broadly, enjoying the fact he had _finally_ caught her off guard. "And I want to hear from you, regularly. Got it?"

They both ignored the rush of Enforcers running down the street to her dojo, probably intent on arresting her.

A slow smirk stretched across her lip plates, and the femme in his hands laughed. "Wow… didn't see that one coming. Sure mech, whatever you want."

Smokescreen nodded and let her go, watching as she disappeared into the tunnels she had shown him earlier that vorn.

His smile slipped as he realized he wouldn't be seeing the femme for probably a long while, there would be no gray painted femme tagging along on his and Blaster's patrol routes, or a soldier type to drink with that could tell stories worse than he could about his shifts, but at least he would know she was still out there.

Possibly driving her sister up a wall, or twelve.

\V/

Nitro onlined again in his own makeshift medical room that he did upgrades and un-installments in. He blinked at his ceiling for a moment before the last few astroseconds before his impact with the ground rose up to his CPU. "Aw, frag it."

"You were lucky." Refit huffed at him, glaring over his desk where she had taken a seat after patching him up. "Any higher up and you wouldn't be _waking_ up. Care to tell me just what the _frag_ you thought you were doing?"

The Praxian lifted his right hand, scowling at the obviously oversized part welded into his systems for a temporary replacement. "Needed more shrapnel, and less force behind it or the mines would've gone off too. I was going to alter that grenade a bit so it wouldn't trigger the others, but ran out of time."

"Well, Shadowdancer was impressed that all the bots she asked for was still alive after your little stunt, but she's still going to rip into you about recklessness on duty and nearly deactivating yourself." Galeforce added from the doorway. "Now come out here and greet your guests like a proper host."

Nitro threw him a one fingered salute as he swung his pedes off his own repair berth. The little medic femme watched worriedly as he got up, looking for any damage to his more delicate internal parts, but simply scowled after him as he walked steadily to the doorway.

There were eight more bots in the living section of the building he lived and worked out of, each of them with a Decepticon faction insignia, as well as Axel and Roulette.

A gunmetal gray mech, that Nitro vaguely recalled was called Barricade, saluted him as he wandered in. "You're fragging insane, mech."

The gray green helicopter next to him laughed, which the Praxian figured had to be Blackout. "That's putting it mildly, Barricade."

The SPARTAN's demolitions specialist simply shrugged on his way to the energon dispenser in the corner. "I had my orders, keep you all alive and defend the city. You rather limited my options there."

"Who ordered you to keep us alive?" Demanded Scrapper irritably, picking at a section of the mech's hand that had become embedded into his armor. Apparently both the ex-military mech across from him and the helicopter knew, but not knowing was torqueing his last sensor cluster.

"Shadowdancer." Four mechs answered the Constructicon gestalt team leader, two SPARTANs and two Decepticons.

Bonecrusher tilted his helm to the side, confused. "The bartender?"

Nitro got his cube and leaned up against the table his assistant and still shell-shocked Enforcer was at. "Our XO. Third in Command, younger sister, whatever you want to call her."

"I figured she had when we weren't killed right away." Blackout added, having been one of the few Cons that had been still online to see what the combat engineer had done to them after his brother's fall. "Only question is, what does she want with the Constructicons?"

Galeforce shrugged. "Don't know. But she said to tell you 'Tarn is your next target', and she'll meet you there."

" _After_ I clear you on a medical standpoint." Refit demanded irritably from the doorway the two SPARTANs had moved away from. "You even twitch in the wrong direction before then, and I'll nail you with a wrench between the optics so fast you'll think _Primus_ reached out and flicked you one."

Since all eight of the Decepticons had gotten to know the little medic femme and that she didn't mind doing them some damage if they protested that they were fine, they all nodded meekly to her, not feeling up to another fight after getting their afts kicked by the Praxian.

Nitro suppressed his snicker, turning to Axel to find out how well the Enforcer had taken being locked in. "Well?"

The ex-bounty hunter turned to the femme in question with a small smirk. "I think we blew her processors."

"You did _not_." Roulette glared at him, flicking nervous glances at the soldiers occupying the shopkeeper that wasn't just a shopkeeper's couches. "I'm still… coming to terms with it."

"He can beat them up again if they annoy you, so stop being so jumpy." Axel informed her with an even wider smirk.

She glared back at him. "That's not what concerns me, _thanks_."

By that time, Refit had reached Hook, the medical expert of the Constructicons. The mech tried to protest, and the medic did as she said and nailed him with her wrench with a loud clang of metal impacting metal.

Nitro looked over at the sound, idly remarking to the still aware Decepticons, "She's annoyed, I wouldn't test her."


	32. Chapter 32

Smokescreen blinked at the femme across from him. "She started all this _that_ early?"

"I don't know," Ruby admitted a bit sheepishly, "all I knew when signing up was that she was going to teach me and 'fire how to defend ourselves. After about a stellar cycle or two 'learning the ropes', as she called it, she gradually included us both into more of the 'advanced classes'. Those where mostly squad based training, what to do when you're operating with a number of other bots and what not. When we joined that class, there were about fifty or so also included that had been there longer than we had, but nothing about this little incident had been talked about in that group. You'll have to ask the others when she started."

The red femme had been in control of Rook's right formation of pseudo soldiers, all two hundred and thirty six of them by her count, and her creation Silverbell had been one of the section leaders that made sure their 'lower ranking' personnel had been well on their way back to whatever they had been doing before the Enforcers could gather their scattered wits and take them into custody.

As a result, the Enforcers had only a good fifty or so bots in custody.

They were not going to be charged with anything given that for one, their arrival probably saved most of Praxus and the city against the Decepticons, and two, Smokescreen and the others were positive that the city might riot if they were.

Praxus was split on the very idea of the femme that had led them all, though. Not quite down the middle, but close enough to worry some bots. The thought of what had been once referred to as simply _one-two-seven_ made a good number of bots all across the city cringe with pity, and the Praxian Enforcer was sure Cinder would have laughed herself silly at the idea of some bot pitying _her_.

Oh, there was still that number that was deeply horrified at the mere suggestion that she had been something of a military built, but they were drowned out by those that were simply grateful over what she had arranged for them. Given that Rook hadn't defended the city all herself, and ensured her force was led by bots that any bot could talk too, the city was starting to think of her as some avenging femme warrior sent expressly to keep the city of culture safe.

The diversionary tactician rubbed one hand against the side of his aching helm at the very idea and motioned for the femme across from him that she was free to leave.

Blaster claiming that Onyx would be massively annoyed at them for letting 'Rook' slip through their hands had not been an exaggeration. In retaliation, he had assigned both him and the communications expert to figuring out just what the SPARTAN had been up to within the city's walls for the duration of her vorn and a half stay and as the both of them were slowly figuring on their own, Rook had been doing a lot more than any bot could have pieced together on their own without some serious digging.

In addition to the times she was basically locked in her own dojo teaching, she had left nearly a good three or four joors of time free each cycle to comb the slums and pick out the best candidates for her militia force by studying the bots there. That didn't include the time she had spent in their presence at a bar or somewhere else, or the time she had trained Sideswipe, although he only knew that because the femme herself had told him and would be one of the things he wouldn't be admitting to his commanders.

Looking over the only partially completed schedule he had for the femme, Smokescreen's very engine protested the idea of actually trying to do the same amount of work every cycle. Oddly enough, except that one time she had been avoiding him Rook had remained surprisingly cheerful, even if she had obviously missed the prior cycles' recharge.

Blaster came back into their little square of cubical with the results from talking to Jackknife, shaking his helm over the missing saboteur. "That femme's unreal. Did you know she almost started a turf war because none of the 'low class leaders' liked the idea they couldn't control her?"

"I wouldn't be surprised." The tactician responded a little glumly as he took his partner's notes to add to his, knowing that 'low class leaders' was their code for 'thief lords'. "The result of that didn't happen to end in that gang nest she cleared out when they snatched Blue', would it?"

"Actually, from what Jackknife had to say about it, yeah."

Smokescreen groaned and let his helm hit his desk. "We're going to be doing this for vorns, aren't we?"

"Probably." Blaster agreed way too cheerfully for his partner's taste. "Apparently, she never did anything without a reason behind it, unless she was bugging you."

The Praxian lifted his helm with a dry grin. "Anyway we can fob off our chain of command if we just said she was annoying one Enforcer for the bulk of her time?"

"They'll want to know who that Enforcer was."

"Frag it."

\V/

Silentforce's helm turned sharply, attracting Zephyr's attention away from the bar. The mech normally didn't really _look_ at the bots he let through the doors, just counted them off until he reached a limit.

This time the gold and black painted femme that had just wandered through saluted him with the SPARTAN's rather unusual salute, using the right hand to touch the corner of her optic ridge, with a broad grin as she passed him.

The helicopter femme blinked at the new femme, unsure of who it was for none of the SPARTANs as far as she knew were painted in those particular colors.

Since it seemed she was headed for the staircase on the far wall, Zephyr moved to intercept her.

"Relax, she's expecting me."

The former Enforcer felt her engine stall when she recognized the vocalizer and the optics, but not the paint. " _Rook_? What the slag are you doing here?"

Linking her arm through the helicopters, the saboteur turned her grin to her as she led them both to the stairs. " _Cinder_ now, Zeph'. I got the idea from a few friends of Orph's, and from when you made the boss femme get a new paint job."

"Frag it all, femme. What you did is already all over the city, you really could've picked a better time to visit." Zephyr huffed, calming her racing engine as she looked around to see if any bot hear her call the SPARTAN by her previous designation.

"Actually, it's the best time to visit, before old Meggy gets back with the other bots whose afts I just kicked." Rook's, or rather Cinder's, grin grew as Kynaite peered over at her suspiciously as the two of them entered his carrier's office. "What? You're not going to hug you poor old aunt? I'm almost hurt, little mech."

She didn't look familiar, but the youngling's optic lit up when he matched the vocalizer to his 'Aunt Ro', and he scrambled over a suddenly alert Nightstalker to crash into the femme's shin plating with a loud squeal.

"So, _Cinder_ , did you have fun?" The Praxian femme behind the large desk in the office asked offhandedly as she set her interrupted work down.

"Oh, _slag_ yeah." Releasing the helicopter and swinging her nephew up to her arms, the black and gold femme slumped into one of the chairs reserved for visitors. "I had been working on that plan for a vorn and a half; it's always nice to see that my efforts were not in vain."

Zephyr looked between her employer and her sister, deciding that she really wouldn't want to be there for the rest of the ensuing conversation given how the Praxian's door-wings were twitching, and silently retraced her steps back down to the bar level.

"Yes, well…" Shadowdancer picked up one of the random things that had migrated to her desk, something that Kynaite had made then pouted over for an entire cycle when it wouldn't work, and nailed her best femme friend on the helm with it. "You slagging _idiot_. I didn't mean confront Megatron like _that_ ; I only wanted you to alert the news vid teams of what you were before the fight."

Cinder pouted at her even as the youngling sitting on her chassis picked up the device his carrier had thrown at her and cheered happily as it finally turned on with a few flashing lights. "Owe meanie."

"Which one is this femme?" Nightstalker asked of the Praxian as he stalked closer to get a good look at her.

"One-two-seven, previously known as Rook." She informed him as she rubbed just under her left chevron spire as the femme waved to the quadruped mech.

Nightstalker sat up with a grin twisting his muzzle. "I like your work, femme. It's nice to meet you."

"See? He's nice about me getting kicked out of my own city, why aren't you?" Cinder jerked her thumb over to the black mech while looking at the XO.

"Because I know you, and you weren't kicked out… you _left_." Shadowdancer leaned back in her chair, inspecting the saboteur before her.

It had been longer than she liked since the two of them could actually talk, Rook had been rather busy with the final touches of her militia force for the last few stellar cycles, and she had to commit even more of her own time to building her insurrection force. Cinder, on the other hand, would have a lot more free time since she wouldn't be doing multiple things at once.

"How did things end with Smokescreen?"

"They didn't, surprisingly." The other femme confessed with a small, fond grin. "He actually managed to catch me off guard, just before I left."

Raising an optic ridge, the Praxian assumed there was more behind that story given how stupidly her saboteur was smirking, but changed the subject slightly. "You are aware you won't be able to see him for a good, long while, right?"

Cinder when back to pouting at the reminder. "Gee, thanks Shadow'. You're just a bright ray of sunshine this cycle, aren't you?"

"Well, you just dumped a massive problem on my fragging lap, so screw off." Shadowdancer just shrugged at her, implying by both words and actions that she wasn't particularly happy with her. "That, and you shot my mech. The one I _told_ you not to touch. What did you think I was going to do?"

"Yell some more?" The saboteur offered with a smirk. "And I'm really sorry about that, I wasn't aiming for him. Really."

"Hey boss femme? You have another visitor." Zephyr appeared in the doorway again, with the subject of the conversation looming behind her.

Soundwave stopped just in the doorway at the sight of the black and gold femme, but Shadowdancer wasn't as concerned over her guest, more alarmed over his condition. "Slag it all, Ro'! That's more than just a little nick!"

Cinder sighed as the Praxian bolted up and over to the mech, the helicopter getting out of her way quickly. "I said I was sorry, boss femme. But he kinda got in the way. I wanted to give Megatron a parting gift, and your mech there had to interfere."

The Decepticon frowned at her over the tactician's helm, wincing as she carefully examined the extent the saboteur's shot had done to his wrist.

"Action: Unadvisable if retreat was to occur." He inspected the femme, noting both the new paintjob and the lack of the SPARTAN's device on her left arm. "Disguise: Ineffective."

The femme shrugged as she set Kynaite and his little project on the floor at his prompting to wander over and show Zephyr. "I'm not staying. Just popped in to say hi."

"Nightstalker, you're going with her." Shadowdancer threw over her door-wing as she extracted the shattered metal that once made up Soundwave's wrist joint. "Frag it, we're going to need to get this all fixed when 'fit gets to Tarn."

Soundwave shrugged, and regretted the action when his damaged parts protested the movement. "Repairs: Can be seen to by Unit Hook."

"He's not coming back."

He jerked in her hold, and the Praxian scowled at him as she switched from looking at his wrist to his shoulder joint. "Hold still, would you? Hook's not dead; he's on his way to Tarn too. Nitro had to practically destroy the rest of the assault team sent to Simfur, but he did manage to leave the Constructicons, Barricade, and Blackout mostly in one piece."

"What medics does that leave the Cons with?" Cinder asked idly as she got up from the chair.

"Knock Out, which I think is the only really remaining medic of any skills at the moment." The ex-Enforcer offered, looking up from Kynaite's project to the other bots.

"While that's all nice and shiny, I would like to know why it is you're sending me to Tarn." Nightstalker interrupted, his tail twitching in his irritation around his four pedes. "Not that I'm objecting or anything, but the reasoning would be nice."

"Yeah it would, wouldn't it?" Cinder mused aloud, then she shrugged and tapped him on the helm. "I'll explain on the way, but if Soundwave's back that mean's Meggy's here too, so we need to go mech."

Nightstalker only followed after her when Shadowdancer glared at him, scowling the whole way. Once the two of them were gone, and Zephyr took Kynaite into another room to settle down for the cycle, the femme tugged the Decepticon mech over to her desk. "Alright, tell me what happened. I got some of it from Rook's view of the fight, but I'm more concerned over Megatron's reaction to it all."

"Lord Megatron: Irritable." The Praxian huffed at him as he released his cassettes from his chest compartment before sitting down.

"Obvious: Acknowledged." Shadowdancer mocked his method of speech, glowering over her desk at him. "Continue, please."

As Frenzy and Rumble immediately slunk off to the lower level to get them some energon, Soundwave shrugged as Ravage jumped up to the couch in the office to catch some recharge. "Prior to return: Silent."

The tactician twisted her lip plates into a frown. "That worries me. I would feel better if he was mad as all get out at me, or even Rook, and making threats in our direction. Being silent means he's _thinking_ , and that could mean something bad for me sometime soon given what else is going to happen."

Soundwave's optics flashed at her words, narrowing as he considered everything that Megatron might order in the wake of this recent loss, and the one that he didn't know about yet.

She caught that, and shrugged as she leaned back in her chair. I suppose the only thing we can do is wait."

\V/

Warcry let his helm fall to his hand when Red Alert showed him the news vids from Praxus, and the part his tactician hadn't sent on to the rest of the SPARTANs, and groaned loudly. "I'm going to kill her."

"Who, Rook?" The mech with him questioned idly.

"Shadowdancer. I bet you fifty credits it was all her idea." The tank drew his hand down over his face plate, finally setting his jaw plate squarely in his palm with his elbow joint on the desk. "Frag it all, femme."

Red Alert smirked as he picked up his data pad that was playing the news vid. "Well, as an introduction, you probably couldn't have done better from here. Rumors about the Decepticon attack that was turned back before the gates of Simfur has also reached us, so I give it about another few joors before every bot on Cybertron knows who Rook is and what she did, as well as connects the 'SPARTAN saboteur' with the surprising defensive capabilities of some of the farther flung Neutral cities."

Warcry hefted a sigh as he got up from his desk chair. "That probably was the idea she was going for. Excuse me, Red. I've got to go talk to the Prime real quick."

The next Security Director waved one hand at him as he gathered together everything he had brought to their little meeting. Leaving the smaller mech to it, Warcry started down the halls to Optimus' office, pausing only once when he passed Stonewall's office.

The mech was watching the same news vid Red Alert had shown the SPARTAN-Bot's CO, and laughing uproariously at it.

"Warcry," he greeted the other unit commander with a grin, "have I ever told you I really like your soldiers?"

The tank stopped in the hall, looking at the ex-guild master incredulously. "Do you want to trade then? I'll give you Rook for Lithium."

"Oh _frag_ no. I imagine it wouldn't be as fun to deal with them as watch them screw your cycle up." Stonewall informed him cheerfully.

Warcry barked out a short laugh. "Thanks, mech. You're some real help."

He just shrugged, turning back to the work he had been in the middle of before Steelbrace had shown him what was on the news channels.

"Hey, you need something defended to the last bot standing, I'm your mech. Or you could just call up Silentforce like the cheater you are. But anything else," Stonewall tapped the personnel reports he had been struggling through, "not exactly what I'm good for."

"So you're not going to volunteer to do the resupply requests from all of the bases? And here I thought I would get to pass that one on to you."

The ex-guild master shuddered in mock horror at the mere thought as the tank continued on his way pass his office to the Primes'.

Warcry cringed internally when it became apparent that Optimus and Ironhide were watching the same thing he had just seen and what Stonewall had just been laughing over like a youngling.

Knocking on the Prime's office door, the tank stood awkwardly in the doorway when the bodyguard tore his attention from the news cast just to see who it was. "Prime, I have a little problem."

"I can see that." Optimus stated evenly, masterfully hiding the grin in his vocalizer at the uneasy mech. "Rook has certainly made any plans made rather moot, didn't she?"

The Commander of the SPARTAN bots grinned rather ruefully. "That's one way of putting it. I know we planned on you coming with me to that news conference, but I think it's something I should do on my own. Not that I can disassociate myself from the Autobots, but it might keep 'SPARTAN' from becoming exclusively linked to the Autobots. Hopefully making us seen as just another combat unit and prevent panicking some residents of the cities."

The Prime carefully straightened up in his chair to look the mech in the optics. "Are you sure that's something you want to do alone?"

He was fully aware the tank was not the most social bot he had in the ranks. _Prowl_ was better than he was only because Jazz dragged him around on occasion to talk to others instead of letting the Praxian tactician lock himself in his office doing work. Red Alert, unfortunately if you listened to the next security director's point of view, had ran into Inferno recently and the Search and Rescue mech had taken it into his helm that the smaller mech needed a friend in the base and had cheerfully volunteered himself for that. Warcry kept to the bots that knew about him, mostly the commanding core of the Autobots and the ex-guild mechs and femmes.

The SPARTAN CO grin turned dry. "I won't be alone, Prime."

He tapped the side of his helm, reminding both mechs that he could call up the rest of his unit if needed.

"I'm sure Shadow's more than up to coaching me through whatever they throw at me."

Optimus grinned at the reminder, recalling the femme when he had seen her last handing over what he had asked of her with a wicked smirk. "I suppose that is true. In that case, I will be leaving shortly before for the inspection of the other bases, if you're sure you don't need assistance."

(ooo000ooo)

The cycle before the conference was slated to be held; Warcry alerted his unit to what was going to happen. He got some mixed reactions back.

{ _Now? I thought we would have more time._ } Knightblade sent back, some of her worry leaking through Spotter's firewalls.

{ _We've had a century and over a quarter of another, one-nine-three_.} Shadowdancer reminded her, amused. { _For humans, that's a long time to function in secret._ }

{ _For Cybertronians, that's not very long at all, ma'am._ } Playing at being the devil's advocate, Cinder cheerfully interjected as she took a break from helping Nightstalker disable some of the mines he had littered Tarn's decimated cityscape with. { _Comparably, that's like what, a year and a half to them? Us? Whatever._ }

Titan redirected the conversation before the femme's took over arguing technicalities with each other. They were Shadowdancer's favorite thing to play with after all. { _I'm glad it's finally happening. I hate dodging the issue of what I was before an Enforcer._ }

{ _That was why you were never selected to join us on the dark side of warfare, zero-one-five._ } Trickflip informed him with a good dose of amusement lacing his own tone. { _Be very, very happy you're not over here with us._ }

The black and white Enforcer snorted aloud, even if it made Bumblebee look at him funny. { _Screw off, one-nine-six._ }

{ _Where the slag does that leave me and three-three-seven then?_ } Drax demanded of the infiltrator irritably.

Silentforce cast his optics up at the bar's ceiling. { _Leave me out of this, please._ }

{ _In that gray area of support._ } The acid green and black mech informed him cheerfully from the underground of Kaon, safe since seekers were notorious for disliking cramped spaces.

{ _Enough._ } Shadowdancer interjected before the Air Commander could verbally rip into the other SPARTAN and the conversation could get anymore derailed. { _You will need to inform the bots closest to you that they may be set upon by reporters soon after that is broadcasted. You all are not to go into work next cycle, except for you one-one-three, there won't be much done if you do and the likelihood that whoever doesn't take it well will try to assault you is greater without some time to process what they would be attacking. There will be no 'accidental' deactivations after this, am I understood?_ }

{ _That was a possibility?_ } Holdout demanded irritably, thinking about the mech that had screwed up the Autobots' supply lines before she took it over. { _Why the frag didn't any bot tell me we could do 'accidental' deactivations_?}

{ _Because of that very reason._ } The saboteur informed her slyly.

{ _I had one. Hit a mech a bit too hard when he was after Blurr._ } Quickgrip volunteered, still wincing over the memory file of crushing a bot's helm in with an improvised quarterstaff.

The sniper spoke up before the tracker could respond to that. { _I deactivated a number of bots just before I reached my city for Percy. On purpose. What the frag did that count as?_ }

{' _In transit' deactivations?_ } Nitro suggested sarcastically.

The XO sighed before taking over the conversation again before she signed off to take her youngling to the Youth Sector. { _This is your official warning. Slag is going to hit the fan next cycle, prepare for it._ }

{ _Where does that leave us?_ } Sideswipe inquired of the others once the Praxian femme was gone.

{ _Screwed between a rock and a hard place._ } Warcry informed him as the rest of the SPARTANs started signing off as well with one of the main stabilizers to the uplink leaving the networked communication line. { _There will be a lot of bots wondering if your CPUs are broke or malfunctioning for joining us, even if we don't tell them who you really are right now._ }

\V/

Crystalsinger, the star reporter for the Central City's News Network, was having a rather stilted conversation with one of the reporters from another station as they waited on whichever bot was going to take over for the Prime since the leader of the Autobots had left for his once a vorn base tour with a number of the other higher ranking bots that had been in Iacon's base. She trailed off as movement in the back of the room caught her optics.

There was a massive metallic green and black mech, almost a tank of one, edging into the conference room and looking over the number of bots there.

Giving the bot she had been talking to an absent excuse, the femme headed straight for him, certain this was the bot taking over for the Prime. "Hello, mech. Little unnerving, right?"

"That's an… interesting way to put it." Warcry answered cautiously, looking over the ice blue and white femme before him.

He already had Shadowdancer in the back of his helm, Spotter had nearly laughed at him when the XO bluntly informed him of why she was on earlier before kicking him off. He had to suppress the impulse to wince when the Praxian femme irritably poked him in the processor to introduce himself properly.

He stuck a hand out to prevent that from happening again. "Warcry, I'm a unit commander."

"Crystalsinger." The reporter informed him as she shook the hand, figuring she would go with small talk until pumping him for information. "Which unit are you from?"

"The SPARTAN one." He had to grin at her shocked expression. "What did you think you all were here for?"

"I…" Crystalsinger trailed off, now uncertain on how to talk to him.

She had heard all about the few known SPARTANs, from the Rook femme of Praxus to this very mech and rumors about a femme one in Central, but hadn't really given them much credit until Rook had popped up in defense of Praxus. Having figured that the SPARTANs would be the topic of discussion, she hadn't expected one of them to be _coming_.

"…wouldn't have guessed, really."

{ _Lying through her dental plates._ } Shadowdancer informed him dryly.

Warcry grinned even broader at her. "Really… well, I suppose I should start this freak show now."

"Wait." The femme caught the mech's arm, suppressing the desire to cringe as she realized that she was holding onto something that could be even worse than a military built bot in temperament. "Um… c-can I talk to you afterwards?"

He felt his XO almost laughing herself out of her chair. { _Ooh, a date. Are you sure you're not too old for her, or rather too young?_ }

{ _Shut up for a moment, three-four-one._ } Warcry sternly informed his third, uncaring that it only made her laugh harder and a twinge of her landing on her door-wings echoed through the uplink to him. "We'll see. Now then, Crystalsinger, excuse me."

She released him and darted for a good spot as he made his way through the throng of bots to the podium set up for him. Working his way through all of the reporters attracted most of their attention, unnerving the mech further.

{ _Really? A massive battle just before the gates of Iacon doesn't faze you, but a group of bots that couldn't even scratch your armor plates make's your spark quiver in terror over the idea of talking to them?_ }

When put that way, Warcry decided he was being a bit foolish, but that didn't mean he had to tell his XO that. Quickening his pace, he jumped up on the center stage with a loud thud, gaining the attention of the rest of the bots in the room. Turning to look at them all, the tank had to grimace over how many of them there were.

"Femmes and mechs, you've been called here to address the recent issue of the soldiers assigned to cities without the prior knowledge of the bots living there. The SPARTAN-Bots."

There was an immediate clamor, but the one question the tank heard clearly was, "How would you know anything about them?"

{ _Come over to the dark side, we have cookies for all new initiates._ } Shadowdancer quoted a soldier she once knew wickedly. { _Beatings are only done on days ending with -y._ }

Warcry had to smirk, having once heard a version of that back in ONI. "My number is one-four-six; class two SPARTAN and assault specialist, the acting commander of the SPARTAN-Bots. Also known as Warcry."

He had to wince and step back as the volume of the bots rose up sharply after an astrosecond of dead silence, feeling Shadowdancer laugh herself off her chair again after only just getting back into it.

(ooo000ooo)

{ _Well… that wasn't so bad, now was it?_ } The Praxian femme inquired of him once all the reporters either bolted from his presence or had relocated back to their original cities, intent on hunting down the SPARTANs there.

Warcry suppressed the desire to throttle his third yet again. Shadowdancer had been more than helpful in answering questions or directing him to avoid others, but she wasn't the bot that had to do it and the dry and sarcastic quips were starting to get on his last nerve cluster. { _That had better be the last fragging time we do this._ }

{ _I'm not all too sure who else we could tell, unless you want to round up whatever Quintessions are left in the universe and tell them too._ }

{ _Spare me_.} The tank ran a hand over his faceplate briefly before moving to get up from where he had been sitting in front of the podium he had previously been standing at, noting that the reporter femme from before was approaching him. Arching an optic ridge at her, Warcry rose up to his full height. "Miss Crystalsinger?"

She fidgeted, smiling weakly up at the mech. "I know of a good café nearby. Care to join me?"

The tank barked out a laugh. "You've got some bolts, femme. I'll give you that. Sure, why not."

(ooo000ooo)

Shadowdancer pulled out of the link, smirking still. She looked up at the two mechs that had invaded her office even with Silentforce scowling at them. "Lord Megatron, Soundwave. How can I help you this orn?"

Since Shadowdancer was aware of her surroundings again, Silentforce stalked off to pick up Kynaite from the Youth Sector, not caring that it was a few joors earlier than normal and the care givers would stare at him, giving the two of them a rather dirty look as he left the office.

Megatron had settled his bulk into one of the chairs she had for visitors, making it creak for mercy under him as he leaned forward and scowled at her. "There were a few things you left out, wasn't there, femme?"

"And that concerns you how?" She asked the ex-gladiator archly, kicking her pedes up on her desk now that the possibility of laughing herself off her chair was less than it had been. "I suppose if you want to argue, Orpheus isn't quite the bot you thought he was. But that has nothing to do with me and begs the question: why are you here?"

"Because I apparently have something within range of my base that has connections to the Autobots, femme. And we're currently at war with them, if you haven't quite noticed yet."

She almost would have bought it even if it was nearly spat at her, if she didn't know more about him than he was apparently willing to let bots live with. He was probably mining for more information from her.

"I've got next to nothing to do with Warcry, other than the usual status reports from my side of the unit. Though I did just laugh my aft off at him." When all he did was glare at her, Shadowdancer huffed at him. "When we onlined, there were about three different arguments about what the frag to do now. I was on the side of 'we had no place in your war, so we should stay out of it'. Obviously, I was on a bit of a minority side. Orpheus was of the opinion of 'give me my slagging orders; I wanna go kill things', and the others ranged mostly on Oprh's side but a few shared my views. So we split up. A SPARTAN per city, cause you never want two SPARTANs brawling with each other and we tend to get very irritable when put together while waiting for something to do. We tend to destroy things that way."

Still scowling, the Decepticon High Commander watched her suspiciously, ignoring his third shifting uneasily behind him. "And this Rook femme, that just managed to defeat my army in Praxus?"

"I have no slagging idea where Rook is. She disappeared from Praxus after what she started, and has yet to report in to me." The Praxian informed him calmly, smirking a bit when his scowl got darker. It was true too. Rook hadn't reported in, Cinder did. "But Ro's one of mine, I'd be a little sad if you killed her. And just a warning, I'm better at fighting than she is."

"What the frag do you mean one of yours?"

"Same way Orpheus and Silentforce are. They're part of my side of the unit, they report to me." Shadowdancer's gold optics gleamed at them. "So is the seeker's Air Commander, Drax, not his trine but they'll probably follow him if anything major happens, Trickflip, Nitro, and the two new bots that were crazy enough to want to join up with us even before they knew just how… _different_ we are. How the others will fall is a bit beyond my ability to guess at this point, but I've got a rather good idea."

"So eight out of sixteen, possibly ten of these SPARTAN-Bots are yours." Megatron clarified, his processors already turned to how he could use her if she ever joined up with his army.

The information given out by the tank the Autobots had was either alarming or the best thing that had happened to Cybertron since the caste laws, to him anyways. The idea that the femme before him controlled such a large part of these alien bots was a little jarring, but given that she was here instead of with said tank, probably meant she didn't agree with either the Autobots or the tank himself. After all, Gygax was the farthest from Iacon as a bot could get, and the femme, from all reports he could get, had been here nearly since the beginning.

"What do you plan on doing?"

"Didn't we already go over this?" Shadowdancer asked of him archly, tilting her helm to the side and concidering the massive mech for a long moment.

"I'm waiting on Kynaite. You know; my youngling? To answer the question I'm sure you wanted to ask," she added before he could verbalize what she was sure would be something rather acidic, "I'll follow him on what he wants done. Kynaite's Cybertronian, not me… well, not completely."

A youngling would be the deciding factor whether or not he got his claws into the strange femme before him. That was… annoying.

The Decepticon High Commander narrowed his optics at her, who only blinked back at him blandly. He couldn't tell if she was telling him the truth or lying through her dental plates, but he had ways to find out. He rose up to his full height intent on leaving now that his pressing questions had been answered, watching carefully as she just tilted her helm back to keep him in her sight.

He also wasn't stupid, if she had really been a part of two galactic conflicts she probably had ways to disarm or severely injure him at a moment's notice even from her supposedly relaxed position, and the fact that if he wanted her to take up a Decepticon faction insignia meant that he had very little to threaten her with.

That didn't mean he had no other options, though. "I'll be watching you, Shadowdancer. Twitch wrong, and I'll have the full force of my armada come crashing down on you."

She just watched him leave, setting her shotgun that had been under her chair on the desk once his pedes got off her staircase. "Well, that was interesting. Hello, Soundwave."

"Inquiry: Percentage of truthful statements."

Shadowdancer smirked as he took the other chair in her office, letting loose the cassettes now that any possibility of violence was out of the room with the massive Decepticon.

"I always tell the truth, 'wave. Like for instance, Rook hasn't reported in because there is no SPARTAN femme by the designation Rook anymore in the SPARTAN-Bots roster. _Cinder_ did, and for some strange reason they share a class two SPARTAN roster number, but Megatron didn't ask where one-two-seven was." He snorted at her, and she sighed. "I can see this is going to take a while."

Even with a battle mask in the way, she could just tell he was smirking. Probably because his cassettes were grinning at her.

\V/

Crystalsinger kept to the base, which meant that most of the bots there already knew a little of the tank's reputation, what little there was to know. However they were military, trained if not built, and Warcry was an officer so there was very little in the way of gaping expressions in the two's direction.

That didn't mean there weren't any helms craned around in his direction, though.

She had two very different expectations of this little interview, either it would be the best thing to happen to her career or a disaster in the making, but she was going to give it her best shot. The tank walking behind her didn't seem too upset over the attention from his fellow soldiers so she had to figure that some bot was going to be asking the questions racing through her CPU.

The café she knew of, the only one as far as she knew, was somewhat popular. Given that the bots stationed on base could go to a rec room for their ration of energon, only bots that didn't mind blowing credits on fuel only a few grades higher in quality where there.

Once they were seated, she set her elbow joints on the table between them and looked straight into his gold optics. "So… you're the SPARTAN Commander, do you know where the others of your unit are?"

"Vaguely." Warcry allowed, punching something into the table's drone control. "I know for sure where a number of the bots I've worked with have gotten to, but a few of them have dropped off the grid. Probably on purpose."

"On purpose?" The femme echoed confusedly. "Why would they do that?"

"Those are mostly the Covert Ops bots, the saboteur, the assassin, and the like. They're not very… trusting. Or sociable now that I think about it." The SPARTAN knew Shadowdancer was going to get back at him for that, but he owed her a few paybacks from her little internal commentary before. "I knew Rook was where she was in Praxus, but she hasn't reported back in yet, so I don't know where she is at the moment."

"So any hints for how to approach the bots stationed elsewhere?" Crystalsinger asked hopefully, since that seemed to be a dead end for now.

Warcry barked out a loud laugh. "Sure. Our tracker is in Central, the sniper in Crystal city, our anti-armor assault specialist is in Tyger Pax, a scout is in Ankmoor, there is a close-quarters combat specialist in Yuss, and obviously Simfur has our demolitions specialist. Approach with caution."

A small smirk stretched across her lip plates. "Sounds like a cast of characters. Do you know them well?"

"Given we only had so long online at any given point in the last galaxy, you could say that."

\V/

Titan ducked into the lab the bots he now worked for worked in, setting Bumblebee down on his pedes once the doors started refusing the reporters entry because they didn't work there.

"I thought you said Shadow' said not to work this cycle." The youngling asked of him, a little confused of why it was they were there if the scary femme had told them to stay home.

That was why he wasn't in the Youth Sector at the moment, something he had no qualms over even if he had something to rub into the other younglings' faceplates.

"Though Shadow's usually right, I'm an Enforcer. I don't get to pick my cycles off, unfortunately." Titan griped as they went up to the lifts to get to the fifth floor of the lab.

His helm was already aching from all the comms sent to him, most from fellow Enforcers but a few from some reporters that had managed to get a hold of his comm line frequency. It would only get worse once some bot confirmed that he was in fact a SPARTAN, and he was trying to avoid that as long as he could.

There were still a whole lot of bots staring at him as he made his way higher up the building with the youngling he was Guardian of, which made the SPARTAN's shoulder plates bunch up.

Wraith was grinning as he made his way in, endlessly amused over the harried Enforcer's predicament. He still wasn't quite adjusted to what he found out he was working with, but knew enough that Titan wouldn't harm him in any way even if he had put a lot of effort into annoying him. "Sup, Ti'? Did you see the crowd out there this cycle?"

"Oh gee, wonder why they're there." The SPARTAN snipped back, hoisting Bumblebee up to the mech's desk and tapping the youngling on the helm so he would stay there.

Ducking into Griz's office, the ex-SWAT Enforcer raised an optic ridge when a femme he didn't know suddenly squeaked at the sight of him. Jadelight rolled her optics, taking the unknown femme by the arm and leading them past the SPARTAN. "Relax. Like we said, he's rather tame."

"Tame!" Titan echoed incredulously as he looked to the mech that had arranged his current working circumstances.

Griz had a slag eating grin on his face plate. "Well, we had to say something so we could keep you and not lose you to your old SWAT team. Your last supervisor is gnawing his finger joints off trying to get you back, given what he unknowingly gave up."

That was a bit different than he recalled happening with the humans after ONI owned up to the SPARTAN-Program, and Titan raised his other optic ridge to join his other one. "Really? …didn't realize I was in such demand."

"Consider it this way," the head of the forensic team informed him, "Tyger Pax already knew a little about you since that Mirror bot incident, there was really little you could have done to keep that from getting out, so we're used to the idea that we have a military class mech posted to guard the city. We had suspicions that wasn't the last of it, and all Warcry did was clear up a few questions about you. Obviously, you left quite a few things out," the mech stated dryly, causing the Enforcer to wince, "but even that could be classified as personal information you'd rather not broadcast, and most of us can see why. You never lied, only bent the truth where we would have been even more confused if you had been completely truthful. Honestly? That's a bit better than most of Cybertron can claim to at the moment."

"Okay… I'm still confused."

Griz laughed at him. "I can see that. Take a seat; I have a feeling we're not going to be getting much done this orn."

"Yeah," Titan informed him as he took the chair across from the older mech, "that's what Shadow' told the rest of us."

\V/

Nitro was a little busy replacing the mines that had either been used or sucked up by Devastator, so Axel had to listen to Roulette nearly have a spark attack in the store. She hadn't quite forgiven either mech for ducking around the issue of the ex-bounty hunter's location, but that didn't mean she still didn't check on them nearly like clockwork every cycle.

The news of Warcry's Intel dump on the reporters assembled in Iacon had most bots either sitting in their living units or out on the streets demanding to know just who the SPARTAN assigned to Simfur was.

Luckily for the Praxian mech, he occupied a rather specialized niche in the city and the bots that knew of him were rather unwilling to give out anything about him, even if he was a bit more than most thought he was.

It really was almost a matter of time until some bot said something to the wrong bot, or the mech himself came back, and every bot and their creators would know just who the bot doing installs and uninstalls in the merchant's district really was.

However, since Nitro wasn't in at the moment to either be confirmed or screeched at, Axel had the dubious honor of being the closest bot to the SPARTAN available.

\V/

Knightblade had missed the initial broadcast of Warcry's spilling the bolts, being elbow joint deep in prepping for another project with Percy, but she got the entire thing from Wheeljack when the mech nearly stormed Perceptor's tower unit later on in the cycle. The inventor found a lot of it amusing, especially when the sniper could confirm that Shadowdancer had probably told the tank how to avoid a question or two about who and where the other SPARTANs were.

"I'm surprised he gave so little away, you know, other than the whole ex-human soldiers built in response to an unexpected attack thing."

"We weren't built, 'jack." Knightblade reminded him; a little exasperated but mostly worried over what this would mean the next time she had a reason to get out of the tower. "Spotter said Shadowdancer was helping Warcry through it all, when she kicked him off that part of the link and locked it down, so it's not all that surprising."

"Given the minute detail that this would be the initial confirmation of any SPARTANs in fact _existing_ against many prior expectations, a great number of the individuals there at that time will most likely return with more inquiries at a later date," added Perceptor thoughtfully, "although with considerably more tact than most just displayed. My own processors wonder how much time it will take for most of our fellow Cybertronians to begin questioning which SPARTAN is assigned to which locations."

Their attention was drawn back as the recorded vid stopped playing, going back to the news channel that the scientist normally had going when the two of them were working. Wheeljack started snickering as Titan was confirmed as the SPARTAN in Tyger Pax, from statements given by his old coworkers in the SWAT teams of the city. "So that's what, two down, and the rest to go?"

The sniper sighed, rubbing at her helm. "The seekers are probably next; the council is going to handle telling the rest of Cybertron who Drax and his trine really are for them. Then… um, from the tone of reports across the uplink I would have to guess Clearsight, much to her annoyance. So that would just leave… Quickgrip in Yuss, Nitro in Simfur, Trickflip, if any bot can _find_ him, underneath Kaon, Holdout in Central, _maybe_ Shadowdancer in Gygax if there is news stations that far down there, and, uh… me."

"Not your unit brother Orpheus?" Perceptor asked quietly.

"Orph' had to remove the SPARTAN device from his armor and I don't think he's had the opportunity to put it back yet, so I highly doubt any bot down there would know that he's the bot for the city since he's usually a bit of an aft normally." Knightblade informed them both, crossing her arms over her chassis. "The rest of them are not assigned to a city, Gale' and 'fit, Ro', 'force, Sides' and Sunny, the _ATHENS_ , so they'll be harder to track down. Then there are the two younglings, but any bot getting to them would have to go through either a torqued off carrier femme or a vastly annoyed Guardian mech to bother them, and I'm not putting any credits on that."

The older mech nodded to show he understood the reasoning, suddenly getting up and beckoning for the sniper to follow. "In an internal review of circumstances, I have decided it would be more efficient to inform our fellow residents of the city of your existence."

"Efficient for who?" The SPARTAN asked incredulously as Wheeljack bolted upright, bouncing on his pedes for the femme to follow suit.

\V/

The scout, unfortunately in her opinion, couldn't avoid the reporters long enough for Knightblade to be pulled from her employer's tower unit and in front of a vid cam.

Clearsight's engine growled as yet another bot supposedly asking for clarification from the Hall of Records she sometimes worked at suddenly launched into an inquiry of her past instead of whatever problem they had manufactured in order to get past the bots on duty to screen those asking for information.

She knew that going into work wouldn't work in the end, the tactician had told them it wouldn't after all, but this was getting borderline ridiculous.

The scout had not confirmed or denied anything, merely booting out those that tried to pry into her past while she was _supposed_ to be working.

\V/

Unknowingly mimicking Shadowdancer only joors before, Trickflip laughed himself off his perch on the rock underground when Iceberg got up the courage to ask him if he was a SPARTAN. "Of course I am; what the slag did you think I was?"

"How were we supposed to know without asking?" The red mini-bot asked irritably, ignoring Dune Runner trying to calm him down.

Ransack chucked a rock at the other mini-bot's helm.

"Would you settle down?" He watched the acid green and black SPARTAN pick himself up off the ground, smirking slightly. "And really now, the small little fact that we practically bent his finger joints back to get him to help out down here didn't tip you off that he was more than a normal bot?"

"You did no such thing," Trickflip informed the mini-bot team leader wryly, "for that would imply I'm down here unwillingly."

"And that makes you a very weird mech." Ransack countered dryly, already used to the SPARTAN's very strange sense of humor and simply rolling his optics when the mech laughed again. "So, which one are you?"

"Gamma- one-nine-six, infiltrator."

\V/

Apparently, the seekers were made of a bit sterner stuff than Drax had assumed. There were only a quarter of his fellow frame types beating on Hailstorm's door to know exactly what the council had elected to be the Air Commander.

He and Spotter still had to go through the plans Wheeljack had sent on to him for defensive options, making only a few changes here and there as they went over what would be needed to keep the next city from falling to Decepticons, since they didn't have an extra tank to throw to the junkyard in the sky again.

Hilariously enough, from Spotter's perspective when the two of them heard the story from their larger trine mate later that cycle; when Tigerstripe had to pass the seekers verbally assaulting the council femme to ask Lightning a question, they all shut up as fast as they could when they spotted him walking down the corridors of the _ATHENS_.

Hailstorm had capitalized on their unwillingness to continue in front of a SPARTAN, and dryly pointed out that any Decepticon would think twice of attacking a SPARTAN, especially one the size of Tigerstripe.

They couldn't find something to argue with her point.

\V/

Following the tactician's advice, Holdout didn't go into work for her next shift. That let Impactor deal with telling the rest of the base that yes, the femme that ran the supply offices was a SPARTAN, and no, she won't kill them if they're late with one or two inventory requests.

When she went in for the next shift, a number of bots that didn't work in the base ended up tailing her around.

The tracker blinked as one of them got bold enough to peer around the open door of her office, arching an optic ridge at her only to hear the femme squeak and hurriedly back out of the doorway. Unsure of what, exactly, was going on with the bots; she took a break and wandered over to the Wrecker Unit's office.

The one handed mech grinned up at her, making Holdout glare at him suspiciously. "What the slag is going on?"

"Well, femme, since you dumped the reporters on my slagging plate, you get to deal with all the fragging gossips that snuck in just to say they've seen you." He informed her cheerfully, smirking broadly at her exasperated expression. "Consider it payback."

The tracker gave him an old fashioned look for that, gesturing with one thumb joint to the braver of the bots following her, the femme who was yet again peering around the doorframe. "Even bots that get into slag they're not supposed to be?"

Impactor leaned over to look at what she was gesturing to, still grinning. "As long as they sign in, I don't slagging care where they end up."

Holdout huffed at him, giving him the SPARTANs' one fingered salute on her way out.

That femme squeaked again as she passed her.

\V/

Cinder cheerfully greeted the Constructicons, Blackout, and Barricade as they reached the dilapidated ruins she and Nightstalker had mostly cleared out. "Watch out for any mines, I don't think we got them all."

"And who the slag are you?" The ex-military mech asked irritably, having expected one small Praxian femme to be there and not a black and gold one he didn't know.

She grinned widely at the mechs, giving them the old UNSC type salute. "SPARTAN one-two-seven, Covert Ops saboteur. I was known as Rook for a vorn and a half, maybe you heard of me?"

The helicopter, who had landed just after Barricade had questioned the femme, winced as his drone clambered up his leg plating and carefully inspected her. "You're… uh…"

"Shadow's older sister. Was assigned to Praxus for a while, but had to leave recently." Cinder clarified with a smirk as she sauntered closer to them. "Now then, we're cleared out a number of explosives, but I would advise you all to place you pedes with care."

She kicked at a pile of loose rubble, and the mine hidden there went flying over the mechs' helms before it exploded.

"Hey, 'stalker? Found that last one we were looking for!"

Scrapper peered at her; looking for what the other two had told him was a method of identifying a SPARTAN. "You don't have their insignia on your armor."

"Nope, had to stop off in Gygax, and I'm sure Soundwave would have been even more exasperated over my visit with it." She reached over and clawed off a layer of paint, chipping away the black until the silver and gold underneath was visible again. "But there you go, if you're really a stickler for rules."

Barricade swallowed hard, trying to forget that he had all but challenged the femme as soon as he spotted her. "So, what are we supposed to call you? And why are you here?"

"You can call me Cinder."

She supplied, kicking over the hole she had made in the ground.

"As to why I'm here; Shadow' decided you all need a base of operations, that wasn't her fragging bar and obvious as all Pit, and she needed some help keeping it quiet. So you're here to build it," Cinder poked the seeming leader of the tan and gray painted mechs with one finger joint then swung around to face the two other mechs, "and you two are dead, so you need a place to be dead in."

Bonecrusher scowled at her, crossing his arms over his chassis. "Who said we'd be building it?"

Cinder stilled, locking her optics on the disgruntled mech. "Well, you do have a few options. I got that you were never informed prior to leaving for Simfur about us, and what Shadow's doing with Soundwave, but that still limits what options I'm allowed to give you."

He rapidly backed up as the femme's optics flashed red and she stalked closer to him.

"You're going to build it, because as far as I know, my orders states to deactivate any and all that stumble over this location while Barricade and Blackout are here. So, you can either play along until the boss femme can get out here to induct you all to her little club, and I'll keep you all safe. You can do nothing, and I'll ignore you for the most part." The saboteur drew back one fist and smashed through the concrete Bonecrusher had backed up against. "Or you can try and annoy me by trying to return to Gygax, and I'll classify you as one of those bots that accidentally stumbled out here and make your function a living _Pit_ until the boss femme can get here."

Scrapper waved his hands frantically to keep the femme from punching his fellow gestalts' helm in, stepping in between the saboteur and the rest of his team. "We'll be good!"

"Well, that's fantastic." Cinder cheerfully informed him as she pulled her fist out of the wall. "Shadow' said she wasn't sure how much of this place is stable, so that's what you need to look at first."

Carefully sliding away from the crazy femme who, apparently, was just like the rest of her family unit in terms of ability, Bonecrusher scrambled once he decided he was safely away from her to the rest of the Constructicons.

The SPARTAN turned to look at the two other mechs, the ones that Shadowdancer was clear on keeping them functioning until she got there. "I don't think you'll have a problem, Blackout. But you, Barricade, need to be careful around here. Nightstalker can't recall where all the mines are."

"Who's Nightstalker?" The ex-military mech asked in confusion, warily glancing to the hole the femme had made in the larger piece of rubble around.

It was one thing to know in his processors that the femmes could do that kind of damage, and a completely different thing to see it happen right before his optics. He didn't see what the Nitro Praxian mech had done after storming up Devastator, nor had he seen what the Galeforce mech had done after the Praxian had blown up the gestalt bot, and dearly hoped this new bot wasn't yet another SPARTAN.

"A mech that Shadow' picked up around here." Cinder pointed out the quadruped mech ambling towards them. "Him."

Blackout pushed Scorponok off his shoulder plating, giving the new mech a once over before turning his attention back to the femme before him and Barricade. "What the slag do you mean _dead_?"

The much shorter mech snickered as he slunk to the saboteur's pedes. "There are no survivors from Simfur on the Decepticons' side, didn't you know?"

"They didn't know." The SPARTAN femme informed the dark mech at her pedes. "Because 'fit disabled their comms for them. They don't even know who the frag I am, funnily enough."

\V/

Quickgrip got Blurr to pick up his next data file that the courier service the both of them worked for needed him to take up the Manganese Mountain Range.

The other data courier had laughed, if a bit shakily, when the SPARTAN made the request. "Do-you-really-think-that'll-work-for-long? You-have-to-go-in-sometime, they-aren't-just-going-to-let-me-pick-up-your-runs-for-you-without-a-very-good-excuse."

"Yeah, but it should let most of this slag die down while we're out. Where is your next run to?"

The fastest mech on land checked the address of his latest delivery. "A-corporation-on-the-outskirts-of-the-city. With-tags-that-say-there-may-be-another-delivery-a cross-the-territory."

Blinking, the close-quarters combat specialist snatched Blurr's data drive. Peering at the address suspiciously, the mech snorted. "That isn't an address for a corporation, it's a warehouse. I did a run that way once. Take mine, I'll run yours."

Before the mech could protest, and that was rather fast, the SPARTAN had already slapped his drive in his hand and was already out of the bar the two of them had met up at.


	33. Chapter 33

Kynaite was worried.

Not the same kind of worried that his carrier was, that was on another level entirely, even if he could only pick up on it through their creator-creation bond. It was the kind of worry that made carrier miss her recharge cycles in ways that just made his still developing processors _hurt_ to try and figure out. He _still_ didn't know how she could operate like that.

He was worried in that something seemed wrong.

The cycles _seemed_ normal, something he knew even now that meant _nothing_. Uncle 'force nearly, and uncle Mark did, end up _deactivated_ on normal seeming cycles, and that still caused a lot of pain for his carrier on the rare times that she could just think about it. He was guiltily grateful that he didn't get to know his uncle Mark very well before his deactivation, given how much small reminders echoed _hurt_ though his carrier's odd bond-link with his aunts and uncles, even if they looked impassive nearly all the times they had when thinking sad things.

Frenzy and Ravage where here, and so was Soundwave for his usual strategy game against carrier. Dreadnought was stocking up behind the bar and Zephyr was busying herself with the cycle to cycle business that came with the place.

He didn't know what went on while he was recharging, carrier seemed a little tight on those details for some reason that amused the helicopter not-carrier.

The only thing that seemed out of place was some nagging problem on his carrier's processors. Something he knew he would never be able to keep up with in the near future no matter _how_ many times the Youth Sector instructors praised him for his intelligence. Carrier was simply _faster_ , both in physical speed and processing power.

Kynaite was mostly sure his various relatives were near or about the same level of _fast_ , because they never had a problem keeping up with her even with how little they saw one another now. An issue that caused something to throw off her normal routine enough that even Soundwave noticed something off.

Not that the youngling had any problem with the blue mech, he rather liked him in fact. On their first meeting the mech had been _still_ in the same way carrier had been when he did something she couldn't understand or comprehend the reasoning for right away, but adapted near about the same manner that carrier had; in that he would examine the issue, decide if it was _good_ or _bad_ and then respond to it. Still, there was something that told him he was always safe with carrier, and it also screamed at him that carrier would not like to be questioned any time soon.

Since he was firmly of the opinion that his carrier deserved her peace; she took care of him after all, first by being that strange shadow that had no source that left him hard to find _fuel_ and stuck around even when there was nothing going on simply to keep him company, then by the flash of light and screech of tearing metal that _saved_ him from the grip of a bot that he didn't like, and with metallic gold optics taking in his features then warm claws that made sure he was safe before _moving_ even a tiny bit, ending in a warm berth with the confirmation of the carrier-creation bond he had extended before they even met the helicopter that was now one of carrier's best helpers; he made sure that neither Frenzy nor Ravage caught on that he knew anything was wrong.

He knew Soundwave wouldn't do anything about the _off_ wrong with carrier until he had independent confirmation that there was something indeed _off_.

Kynaite knew he may never get to carrier's level of blinding brilliance or her ability to intimidate others even if she was shorter than most bots she dealt with; or Silentforce's skill in looming and looking scary even if completely silent; or Cinder's, who had been called Aunt Rook and was gray once upon a time and who didn't mind if he still called her auntie Ro' if there was no other bots but _theirs_ around, craftiness and sneakiness anytime soon; but that was okay with him.

They were more than good enough for the time being until he was.

\V/

Knightblade scowled, Perceptor tilted his helm in confusion, and Wheeljack just grinned bright enough that the two of them could tell even with his face mask in the way. The sniper sighed tiredly, the scientist nodded slowly, and the inventor clapped his hands together excitedly.

"Anytime soon, Knight'?"

She responded to the slighter and masked mech in the room with a rude human gesture. "Give me a moment."

Perceptor watched as she glared at the table they were going to use to support her in order to look at her spark casing, as if she could melt it down by the power she had in her optics alone and avoid the surely uncomfortable prying she was in for, arching an optic ridge as the moment passed the three of them by. "While I applaud the creativeness in the various stalling maneuvers you have employed to delay an operation we all are aware of needing completion, this will still be conducted this cycle and not next, Knightblade."

The SPARTAN pressed her lip plates together and ignored him for the moment. This had too many uncomfortable reminders of the time immediately after the augmentation the SPARTAN-IIIs had gone though, with the nearly constant watching and prodding to ensure everything promised by Doctor Halsey for the class IIs had at least occurred in the class IIIs with minimal aberrations from the intended results.

Nervously tapping the tips of her finger joints on her thigh plating for a brief moment, the ex-Navy sniper turned Cybertronian scientist jumped onto the table with a clatter of metal on metal sounds quick enough that both mechs in the room with her started in surprise. "Let's get this the frag over with, please."

"Very well."

Wheeljack patted the sniper on the shoulder plates as he reached for his set of tools. "Don't worry so much, Knight'. I haven't blown up anything this important in nearly two vorns."

"…that's not encouraging, 'jack."

\V/

The Praxian standing in the entrance hall of his Enforcer Station deserved another look, even though Praxians were normal visitors to the Station. Not that Smokescreen was looking in _that_ way, he was taken, but the mech had been plastered all over the news vids ever since the Decepticon attack on Simfur and he was now that recognizable.

Nitro, the SPARTAN-Bot demolitions specialist and cohort sibling to Rook, was standing in his Station looking rather bored at the attention he was drawing.

Smokescreen had a bad feeling about this.

The tan and gray mech noted his arrival in the same manner Rook, now Cinder, had always done.

Creepily.

He just suddenly turned and started walking to him with a purpose, features blank, making his Enforcer's programming spasm over intents and reasoning. Smokescreen found his arm assembly in a tight grip and was being led to an interrogation room without one word of why.

He _really_ had a bad feeling about this.

"Before you panic, Cinder sends her greeting from Tarn…"

The Enforcer diversionary tactician blinked. Maybe this wouldn't be as bad as he thought, although he didn't know what his femme friend was doing in a destroyed city.

"…and the bounty on Rook's skid plating has been turned in by a mech we know."

…what? " _What!_ " Smokescreen spluttered, spark seizing at the news.

 _Then_ his battle computer kicked in and he sank into one of two chairs in the bare room. _Oh._ He ran one hand over his faceplate, the other holding the area right above his spark casing.

"She's going to give me a spark attack at this rate."

The mech now sitting across from him finally smirked. "Yeah, but she wouldn't be her without doing that to some bot, and we're all perfectly happy it's you and not us. Long story short, a part of the communications array was turned in three orns ago by a bounty hunter on my payroll, and its 'registered' to Rook's internal systems. Gossip is going to start catching on about her 'death', and she wanted you to know beforehand that she wasn't really deactivated before you heard the rumor about it."

The Enforcer's cooling system wheezed as he put together the facts the other Praxian was giving him. "So, when one of you 'SPARTANs' are offed, another pops up someplace else?"

"No, Mark's really gone." Smokescreen winced as the other's door-wings arched in 'distress' before smoothing back out in 'calm'. "That was far too fast and way too much, even for us, for Markmaker to have survived it. But there are a few other things I'm here for officially, and that ties into one of them."

That sounded seriously bad. "Officially? Why _are_ you here?"

Nirto grimaced and tried to wave away any suspicion over his presence, but his door-wings once again betrayed him and fluttered in 'annoyed'. With a sigh, the Spartan ran a hand over his chevrons and shrugged.

"My city is deciding if they want to keep me there, now knowing what I am, and if they want to throw me out. So I had the free time to come out here and give you the news personally like she asked one of us too. Officially, I'm here to give you the news about Rook. Unofficially, I'm here on business from Simfur. SPARTAN wise, I'm here to tell you where Cinder is and do this last bit that we're trying to keep from one of the seekers because that won't go down well at all until she stops grieving."

That last part sounded just as bad as 'vacationing SPARTAN-Bot' had. "What bit?"

"Well, is this bit awkward, but..." The other Praxian set a box he pulled out of his subspace and set it on the bare table between them. "One-two-seven's dog tags. It had come to the attention of our formidable XO that our funeral practices have come to the attention of bots we would have rather not known of them, and as such they need to be followed in Rook's case, even though…"

Smokescreen nodded jerkily. "Why am I getting them? Rumor was of the opinion that they were given to the most important significant … oh."

"You're the closest to Rook outside the unit. Had you two not figured it out between yourselves, they would have gone to Shadowdancer as her superior officer. Or maybe Jazz, she really did like her Autobot counterpart's sense of humor."

Nitro didn't look like he wanted to hand them over.

That was perfectly fine with the Enforcer because he really didn't want them, as horrible as that sounded out of context and even though giving it over would be like tact permission from his femme friend's cohort.

He _knew_ Rook was fine, even if she wasn't Rook at the moment. She would come back to him, in a different form probably but still her, _but_ the 'dog tags' would just be a reminder that she couldn't be there with him for a long while despite any positive thought he could attach to them.

If she really had been gone, he probably would have done as the seeker femme Dawnglider. Cling to whatever little was left and almost shut down in grief for what had been lost to the Well of All Sparks. Rumor and hearsay really had been cruel to the femme, the only saving grace the Praxian Enforcer could see for her was that the Air Commander and his trine were all SPARTAN-Bots. The seeker frame set was closing ranks around the only full Cybertronian that had known the Enforcer of Vos, and the SPARTAN 2IC at the time, Markmaker.

Smokescreen slumped into his chair as he realized he was possibly in for the same thing as the seeker femme. Once it became accepted fact that Rook was … not here, he would gain the same kind of attention if any bot knew he held her tags.

It was rather well known that he and Bluestreak were close to the SPARTAN-Bot that had been assigned Praxus to defend in case of attack, the news vid teams had only just stopped harassing him about what kind of relation he had to the gray femme that ambushed the Decepticon attack force within the city's limits with her own army.

Even all of the militia bots Rook trained actually looked to him as their commander while the SPARTAN wasn't in the city and not Jackknife, who 'officially' ran the ' _Praxian_ Defenders' protection guild in the slums.

It was a difficult position for the Enforcer to be in, on one servo he had an army and on the other was his programming as a civilian protector. When the hecklers unable to accept the SPARTANs as bots of their own turned on him, what would that grieving army do to their lost leader's significant other's harassers?

"It's not going to get that bad." The demolitions specialist interrupted his train of processing and firmly set the box down. "Shadow's got a plan, so Cinder is only supposed to be out there for half a vorn before getting new orders."

"How do you know what I was thinking?" Smokescreen's door-wings jerked in 'disbelief' as he firmly planted the comment into his CPU. He wouldn't put it past some kind of ex-alien talent of reading processors at this point.

Rook had the same bad habit of anticipating him when he started to worry.

The other Praxian shrugged again. "It was the same place the rest of us went. Drax said you could come out there if you want to, and Prowl wishes for me to convey that he would arrange something if you need it. They'll make room for you and your brother."

Wasn't that an unwanted confirmation that this was really happening to him? Seekers did not have good relations with the most similar, ground-pounder frame type to their own.

The very fact the Air Commander himself was extending an offer of sanctuary in tandem with his own older Praxian brother had all kinds of undesirable outcomes possible in the future. It could have been a decision made without taking into account that bad oil between frame types, simply a public offer of soleus between bots that knew one another through a 'deactivated' one, but Smokescreen highly doubted it.

If you spent any amount of time with one, you realized _fast_ that SPARTANs were not the dimmest lights in the array.

"Err … tell them thanks, but I'll stick it out here for the time being." Smokescreen gingerly plucked the box out of the shallow indentation the SPARTAN had left in the solid metal table. The habit of leaving impressions on inanimate objects was another trait shared between SPARTANs, the imprints Rook had left in their usual oil bar were downright infamous now.

He had to wonder how the rest of that unit was dealing with the public backlash against them if Nitro was dealing so badly with his city debating against allowing him to stay. He didn't know how to ask without the SPARTAN getting annoyed with him, though.

"I'll, um … put them somewhere."

"She'll want them back, just so you know."

Keeping that last comment firmly in the front of his processors, Smokescreen followed the SPARTAN out of the interrogation room to deal with his partner, his cassettes, and his own younger brother. Every bot else could wait for an orn.

\V/

Clearsight frowned and turned to look at her coworker, firmly reminding herself that the mech didn't realize she was one of those 'horrible affronts to Primus' since she flatly refused to collaborate the rumors. "How do you know what kind of bots these SPARTANs are? Who's to say what they'll do when the war's over?"

The mech puffed up a bit, thinking only of impressing the pretty analyst femme from the ancient history subsection of Ankmoor's Hall of Records. "They're _war built_. Once they're done ripping this conflict down to pieces, they'll start in on each other, then they'll get around to us and destroy Cybertron as we know it. Every bot _knows_ that."

"Really?" That was a depressing line of processing. Were they really only tolerated for whatever assistance they could offer in this war? The scout rubbed one forearm, a habit of unease she had never gotten rid of even through her SPARTAN training. "I think … I'm going to go home now."

Leaving the spluttering mech to his own devices, the SPARTAN tripped her way out of the building and into the busy streets.

Maybe in trying to find a similar process in Cybertronian to their training and augmentation had been a bad idea. However it had been _hers_ , the first one she had found for the SPARTANs when trying to put it all into the words of an alien language and lifestyle.

It hadn't seemed too bad at the time, stars _knew_ humans had gotten worse than that in conflicts between skin color and regional allegiances, but the way the Cybertronians were taking it all made the femme wonder if there hadn't been a better term for it than the one decided on.

Shadowdancer flatly refused to think that her initial proposal of war built as a comparable term to what a SPARTAN was might have been wrong in hindsight, Spotter and Warcry agreed with the XO. Humans had become so numb to derogatory terms in their spats over them that the idea of something being as _abhorred_ as the war built label was on Cybertron had taken them all by surprise after the admittedly short but rocky start on it with the Autobots.

Technically, it _was_ mostly true. War built meant literally built for no other purpose than war.

The faction the Quintessons had built to protect them and labeled first as war built, which later became the first known Decepticons, had a lot of history in not being completely stable in the CPU. Which was understandable, given that they had no other programming to understand anything outside of their limited responsibilities that anything new likely threw off a lot of carefully calibrated systems when trying to identify and sort it into that old purview of _defend_ and _attack_.

SPARTANs hadn't been built, but more than half of them only knew of their past and original designations because they got curious once and looked up their own records. All they really knew before Cybertron was _war_ ; how to fight it, how to survive it, and how to skew some things to make one agenda come ahead of another. There had been only the minimum of downtime for any of them, shipped like packs of ice between missions, for them to really live before they became something other than human.

Humans were adaptive. To just about anything, they could become used to conditions and work around them to no longer just survive, but _thrive_.

It showed in the shift of pigmentation of the African natives, able to continue physical activity in high temperatures that would wipe out the best of Englishmen with heatstroke.

It showed in the recovery of a terminally ill patient because medical professionals replaced some faulty original hardware with a second artificially built one and the patient adapted around it.

An abused child becoming a better member of their society than his or her abuser.

The creation of peaceful protests gaining ground while in a worldwide fought war.

That same adaptive, problem solving trait was why AIs had been patterned after the human brain.

That was also a blind spot Cybertronians didn't have.

SPARTANs would become used to a certain behavior pattern, like outright hatred directed at them. Used to it to the point of ignoring any premature signs of violent intent coming from a Cybertronian they knew, or thought they knew.

Humans would adapt and overcome social problems after a while, and Clearsight had the sinking in her spark feeling that the blind spot she had only recently felt out might do some damage before she could bring it to the others' attention to it.

The SPARTAN scout keyed open her Ankmoor flat, twisting her lip plates when the echoingly empty apartment yawned open before her with the promise of a cube of _ATHENS'_ mid-grade and a fiction book file.

She needed a better hobby for her off time.

\V/

"So, that's it? You just turned in a part you and Nitro picked up from a hardware store down the road, and they paid you for killing a SPARTAN-Bot?"

"Of course not. Spotter had to hack the manufacture's records first." Axel frowned harder at the box of credit chits sitting on the counter of Nitro's shop. There really wasn't anything wrong with it, it was just … "And I checked before I even attempted to turn it in. It was Rook's according to every system file and manifest I verified it on."

Roulette huffed at him, glancing again to the box he had all but thrown down and was now glaring at. Not that the lesson on how bounty hunters confirmed the grisly spoils of their profession was unappreciated, but there was something more than the Praxian SPARTAN's absence bothering the other mech. "So what the pit is wrong with you? The credits' good and you've fulfilled the promise you gave some scary second officer of their unit. There is no way duping the, rather illegal in the first place, clerks who run the bounty offices is bothering you this badly."

"It's… I dare you to say that to Shadowdancer's faceplate." The mech sighed, throwing himself in one of the empty waiting chairs of the front store room. The place was depressingly empty without the demolitions specialist and the customers that normally would have occupied his time right about now. Chipping some of the acid green and purple temporary paint off his hands, the ex-bounty hunter tried to give words to his problem. "It's so stupid, but it's the way Nitro had _looked_ at the fragging box then at me."

The Simfur Enforcer tapped a finger joint against the lid, optic ridge raising up when she was given such a horrified look from a mech that had professed not to be bothered at all by his employer's history that she had thought he wouldn't ever feel fear from anything as mundane as a box. "What about it?"

"Like I had actually _been_ the one to kill his slagging sister."

Nitro had suppressed most of it, but the twitches that were so much more common now than when he had been first taken hostage by the SPARTAN had told Axel a lot.

He didn't agree with what his XO had told him to do, taking Rook's 'dog tags' to her mech in Praxus and finding a part to pass off as the saboteur's. The Praxian was such a straight laced soldier it was almost funny … until it wasn't anymore. Nitro had done it anyways, trusting in both Axel's work and Shadowdancer's word that it would all work out right even if it went against everything he was to proclaim one of their own 'dead' to the whole of Cybertron.

However it was the look he had been given an orn ago before the mech had left his store to him and got out of Simfur while the worse of the argument about the SPARTAN's presence was going on. Axel wasn't a psychologist, he would leave that to the other Praxian of that unit he was working for and whichever of her little minions dabbled in it, but he had known before this that Nitro had projected some of his own values onto him. It wasn't until the ex-bounty hunter had reached the shop with his practically free credits that he realized exactly what Nitro had meant by _blood money_ , apparently a term in his native language file about credits earned by harming others for it. Now he didn't even _want_ the fragging credits anymore, not with how much he was being paid by the SPARTANs already and from how just _seeing_ it had scored the SPARTAN a hit somewhere Nitro couldn't hide from him.

"Hey, 'lette. Know any good charities?"

\V/

"Why?" Bumblebee asked in his I'm-confused-because-your-using-too-many-final-frame-words-I-don't-care-to-learn tone of vocalizer.

Titan let his helm hit Griz's desk, promising a lot of slag in Wraith's immediate future for convincing him that _telling the youngling about the current split in public opinion around him and the other SPARTANs before anyone could come up and harass him about 'what his Guardian really was'_ was a good idea before he tried returning the young mech to the Youth Sectors next orn. "Because some bots just don't like me or my cohort, Bee'. They don't like what we're built to do."

"They don't like that you're built for defending bots?"

"Now you're just being obtuse. I know you know what I'm talking about here."

"Of course I am." The still smaller yellow and black mechling grinned up at his Guardian, kicking his pedes against the desk he was sitting on. "And yeah, I do know. Jadelight told me all about it, like last megacycle, and she said Wraith was trying to get you to do it but you're a little slow."

The Enforcer sat straight upright, mock scowling down at his charge. "Hey now, that's below the belt."

The youngling shrugged his emerging door-panels, nowhere near as protruding as a Praxian's door-wings, and continued on. "You still have to explain that phrase to me and what it means. I claim ignorance to any belts. But I really don't care what other bots say about you, Ti'. You got me out of the Youth Sector just because I helped you out once, and that's good enough for me."

"So, because I bought your silence?"

"Nope, your XO bought my silence." Bumblebee grinned even more broadly as he reminded his Guardian of the facts of life with him. "I like you because you're here with me."

There really wasn't much one could say to that, so Titan accepted defeat in this conversation and tried to pick up an older one. "Erm … thanks, 'bee. But if you really liked me, you wouldn't have door-panels installed."

"I'm practicing to be the next Shadowdancer of the SPARTAN-Bots."

The SPARTAN froze in the act of getting up, staring at his charge in horror.

"What? She's _wicked._ "

\V/

Shadowdancer ignored the attention she was attracting as she stalked down the halls of the Gygax base for the Decepticons. For what she was sure this was going to be over, the more bots that knew she was _here_ the better it would end for _her_.

Megatron had demanded her attendance for some reason Soundwave had not been able to inform her of, but she could guess. With two attacks on separate cities failed because of bots she was associated with, the leader of the Decepticon Armada had to be losing what little patience he had by now since she still refused a commission as a Decepticon officer on the excuse of her scraplet.

The fate of a doomed spy was usually death.

That had been the role she had taken up for the SPARTAN-Bots, that and the role of an obvious target. With her here to pass on information, Warcry would be able to advise the Autobots on how to navigate the opening salvos in the schism between Cybertronians. With the work she had been doing, Soundwave would be able to finish salvaging the Decepticons and keep them from becoming as mindless and murderous as the Flood in another galaxy.

With her as a known associate of the SPARTAN-Bots, she would be the first to catch the _Pit_ Megatron would finally resort to bringing down on anything like her for meddling.

Even if this war had been going on for vorns already, the fighting had not gotten to the point of retaliation and counter reprisals that would signal the end of any hope of peaceful compromise.

Sentinel Prime had desperately tried to keep the Autobots from falling into the same processing set the Decepticons seemed to have taken up, that if it wasn't with you it was against you, and had stalled the civil war at defining the lines drawn between factions. For a mech that had come into power in the end of the Golden Age, it had been a sensible slant to take on the beginning violence.

Optimus Prime wasn't that kind of Prime. He had been reformatted just before he lost his originating city, took his duty on the frontlines seriously enough to risk his own spark along with the rank and file soldiers, and would probably be known in time as a Commanding Prime rather than as a politician. He had already experienced some of the fighting that was going on in the cities of Cybertron, the struggle most went through to simply sustain the kind of function they had known for vorns.

The arrival of the SPARTANs on Cybertron was little more than a stopgap fix. Yes, more neutral bots and civilians would now survive, the virus was being addressed, and they had managed to find a few bots and salvage them from functions that wouldn't have been quite as nice… but there were too few SPARTANs to make any major difference in how the war would be fought.

They could simply start killing anything that moved on the Decepticon side of Cybertron. It had always been an option, but like she had told Soundwave not too long ago function without conflict was boring. Not only that, and as she told Sideswipe, if the Autobots pulled a decisive victory with the situation as is anything with a Decepticon processing bent would be stomped out and exterminated and it would be centivorns before any bot had the bolts to try changing the status quo again.

Probably a saner one, but still.

Scarily enough, the reverse was also true. Though she didn't like to pull it up in her CPU, the implications of what would have happened if Shockwave had gotten his bent joints into the SPARTANs before Refit could hide them were spark stopping. Her battle computer would go back to that idea every now and again, insisting that it had to be planned for even if she had dealt with the root cause of that scenario.

In order to save Cybertron from herself, something within the factions had to change. The Autobot faction was mostly okay, it was almost too ridged and fixated on the defending Cybertron bits, but it was acceptable. The Decepticons… were as mad as a cyber-cat dipped in hot oil.

It was worse than a paramilitary group trying to change a facet of reality. Splintered chains of command who had no real method to them other than obliteration of the opposition, no responsibility for the acts of the bots simply claiming they were a part of the faction. Now, anyways.

Before this, before Megatron had taken the name and perverted it, it basically referred to the only military branch of Cybertron. Those Decepticons had been viewed as out of sight out of processor, and any returning to Cybertron had been shoved either into Polyhex, Gygax, or any other crack in the cities where they would have been forgotten or overlooked.

There even was a fraction of those previous Decepticons still functioning. Orpheus had nearly killed a fair few when he accidentally stumbled in on a raid on them planned by Ratbat before his reformatting, a highly unusual occurrence of happy accident for any SPARTAN but doubly so for the assassin.

However the dark green and black mech had seen an opportunity and ran with it, taking out his less coherent coworkers in Darkmoor and saving a femme they later learned was the supposedly deactivated Greenlight of the Ancient Council. _She_ had capitalized on the protection offered and took the assassin back to where the last splinter cell of the old military of Cybertron was still operating.

Shadowdancer had cheated like the SPARTAN she was, sending Sideswipe to observe _those_ Decepticons to change his firmly held conceptions about the whole faction.

Her only regret now was that she hadn't been able to order Silentforce to grab Kynaite and run with Zephyr to Tarn before she left. Doing so would have tipped the bots now watching her bar that she knew something was wrong, and her youngling's only saving grace now was that he couldn't be used as leverage against her for the moment since Megatron was playing possum right now.

The astrosecond the bodyguard specialist was tipped off, he would all but knock a hole through all of Gygax getting him out.

Good thing she had already sold the bar to Dreadnought.

However Megatron thought this was going to play out, Shadowdancer intended to royally frag it up.

(ooo000ooo)

Orpheus' helm jerked up.

Scourge, lounging on a bench as the two of them sat around and waited for their patrol shift to start, turned to ask the assassin what had crawled up his exhaust. He ended up gaping at empty air.

Cyclonus surged to his pedes, pulling the other mech upright as well. "Fragging Pit-spawned mech. _Finally_ we're getting the slag out of here."

The SPARTAN posing as a Decepticon Shock Trooper bolted out of Darkmoor like the smelter pits were overflowing. Dead End was mostly used to his presence now, and although his speed gained some interest no bot wanted to get in his way anymore.

Ignoring the door Emerald had threatened him with dire consequences for not using, the assassin barged his way into the command center of the last true military Cybertron had. More than fifty or so energy weapons were aimed at his helm the moment he came through the door without being announced, but Orpheus didn't even wait for the barrels to be lowered.

"Megatron's made his move. Shadow' said if you want in, come with me to Tarn."

\V/

Refit blinked her optics. "Um… What?"

Quickgrip rolled his optics, firmly planting a heavy hand on Blurr's shoulder plates to make him sit down. "It wasn't that bad, mech."

"Oh, I don't know, Quick'. That sounded pretty bad to me." Galeforce looked between the fast talking mech to the steadily rising anger showing on Refit's faceplate. "What was that about a warehouse full of mercenaries?"

"They were actually bounty hunters, and hush you." The close-quarter combat specialist wearily leaned back from the battlefield medic. "And nothing was even nicked, 'fit. I swear. I'm perfectly fine, no malfunctions in any system."

The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots rubbed his faceplate as the medic exploded over unnecessary risks, snickering to himself.

The four of them were basically wasting time before they were expected to leave Yuss and attempt to cross the Manganese Mountain Range, Shadowdancer had threatened them all with various levels of violence if they were even a joor early to meeting up with her and the rest of the Covert Ops bots in the ruins of Tarn.

Why the XO wanted to have the last of the reboots done on Silentforce, Orpheus, and the femme now called Cinder in the middle of a destroyed city was beyond the processing capabilities of even Refit, but they were going with it.

That meant the two SPARTAN-Bots, the creation of one aerial capable one, and a neutral mech with Autobot sympathies were sitting in an oil bar, trying to ignore the bots peeking at them and the silver and gold coat of arms that marked most of them out as SPARTANs.

When the medic femme paused mid word, all three mechs gave her their undivided attention. The heavy thump of her sitting down a bit too fast saw the beginning of concern. Her next words had all of them scrambling. "We need to go to Tarn now."

Refit regularly talked to Shadowdancer. She would be the first to know if there was a problem on that end. That was the thought Galeforce and Quickgrip's processors got stuck on when they left Yuss behind.

\V/

Cinder was a very easygoing femme. Usually.

That had been the opinion formed by the Decepticons hollowing out a base in the middle of a destroyed city, after the unease of being basically AWOL had left them and they had become mostly bored with rebuilding.

At least Blackout and Barricade were bored, the Constructicons had all but cheerfully thrown themselves in designing a base and building it with only the materials they had on hand.

Even Bonecrusher and Hook, after they had gotten used to having some parts deactivated without their permission, had started pitching in with some enthusiasm. Scrapper had taken the suggestion to help, which had come out as an 'or else' kind of suggestion when given, and had directed his five fellow gestalts in rebuilding the first and second sublevels of the Cybertronian underground in order to make a stable plane to build any kind of structure on top of.

Cinder had then pointed out that for a hidden base that would have been blatantly obvious to any aerial observer… or any bot that swung by Tarn and started wondering about the building sticking up out of the middle of the old blast radius.

In response to that, now the base was being built down instead of up.

Besides the leveled surface, there were two levels already mostly complete. The first sublevel had little but large empty rooms, intent was that they would be used as either rec rooms or offices but were currently in use as berth rooms. The next level had pleased Hook, for it was for actual personnel quarters and the repair bay that Mixmaster was currently finishing up. The rest of the Constructicons were now working on the last level, clearing out the space and structuring the last of the space needed by any command element for a fully functioning base.

It was echoingly empty, besides the bare essentials scavenged from around the dilapidated city. It was also easy to hear any bot, even the SPARTAN one that didn't seem to make any noise normally, run up the bare metal staircases.

Barricade cautiously followed the femme up, uncertain as to why the laidback Cinder was flat out running.

The ex-military mech stopped dead when he saw that the surface had not been like this when he saw it last. There was a dark green and black mech standing next to Cinder, two metallic painted mechs that had the creepy similar build of spark twins standing behind them.

Then there where the mechs and femmes he hadn't seen in _vorns_ trickling into the space from the ruins of Tarn. Since he had stupidly taken half the military to Megatron so the cracked mech could kill them off slowly, since he had lead more bots to their death than any military operation he had been a part of before.

Commander Greenlight, rustier than she had been before she left the military to take up a spot on the Council of Ancients but still her, glared at him when she caught sight of his paint. "You better have a good reason for what you did all those vorns ago, Lieutenant Commander Barricade, or I'm going to _rip out your spark chamber myself_."

Cinder's vocalizer clicked and she spun around to face the shocked Decepticon Shock Trooper.

"Oh yeah, did I mention we're about to get personnel for this base of ours?" She peered around at the bots still coming in. "And this isn't the last of them, either."

"Who else is inbound?" The mech standing next to her drawled.

"Well, we've now got the Polyhex portion. That just leaves the Gygax set Soundwave's guiding, I _think_ Trickflip's coming, and whatever seekers Screamer can manage for Drax."

\V/

Shadowdancer arched an optic ridge, supremely unimpressed with both herself and the other mech. This was . . . not at all that surprising.

Oh, it did throw a few wrenches into things, but she could adapt to it.

In other news, she found how Shockwave became so immoral and _why_ what had gone on possibly happened, even if she had pieced together most of it herself, before the two of them destroyed Tarn.

"Magnificent, isn't it? The Robo-Smasher completely rewrites a Cybertronian CPU to a more . . . reasonable programming. I was going to use it on the Constructicons after they returned from Simfur, the whole slagging lot of them have been complaining of too much destruction and not enough building, but since they seemed to have had a small deactivation you'll do."

The Praxian had to wonder if it would work on her programming if it was in her native Russian. "There seems to be a small problem, Lord Megatron."

"Oh?"

"I'm not in it."

The Decepticon's Supreme Commander froze, whirling around to face the SPARTAN standing in the middle of the room. Or where she had been standing.

Shadowdancer decided that if she ever figured out who had invented the stealth system for the MJOLNIR armor, she would kiss them. Metal lip plates or not.

Megatron had led her into the room claiming something inside would change her processor about enlisting in the Decepticons. In all actuality, Shadowdancer intended to do her enlistment once Soundwave started taking applicants.

She was sure that wouldn't go over well at the moment.

The rapid movement of flexible metal spotted out the corner of her optics had spooked her into running pre-battle protocols, something that would never get out to Cinder if the XO had anything to say about it, and activated the stealth systems built into her almost without input from her higher CPU. Now she was carefully pitching her vocalizer so the mad ex-gladiator mech wouldn't be able to pin point where she was.

"I really have to wonder where you got this thing from."

"Stay put, and I'll show you."

The two of them were in a sealed room with the Robo-Smasher. Megatron was walking around in plain view, and the machine was ignoring him even when activated for the purpose of reformatting. Why?

Shadowdancer twitched before sliding out of the way of another broad swipe Megatron was using to parse out where she was. The door she had come in was behind the massive silver mech, and apparently Silentforce was standing behind it. Once this was over, she was going to beat the skid plating off him.

"I think I would rather guess."

"Try then. I can almost guarantee you won't be able to get close."

(ooo000ooo)

Greenlight had sorted her troops and rejoined the SPARTANs standing on the surface by the time Soundwave reached the base with his part of the Decepticon faction.

Cinder inclined her helm to the mech, worried optics taking in the scraplet very familiar to her. "Soundwave, why do you have Kynaite?"

"Answer: Unit Silentforce instructions for class three emergency. Clarification: Threat identified to; Unit Shadowdancer, Unit Kynaite."

"He got around the boss femme's orders by making sure you took care of him?" Orpheus started laughing. "She's going to be _torqued_."

The cobalt mech shrugged after setting the youngling down. "Preference: Unit Shadowdancer Status: Functioning."

"Can't argue with that, mech." Cinder quipped as she bent to greet her nephew. She could now even see Zephyr on the horizon of broken buildings.

(ooo000ooo)

"From what I was able to dig out of Tarn, it has to be Quintession in origin… and Shockwave was the one to dig it up. He was also its first victim."

Megatron hesitated, still trying to triangulate her position from the echoes of her vocalizer. "You went to Tarn?"

"You'd be surprised what a femme can find there. Like a few, almost _too_ corrupted data files from the Hall of Records." Why wasn't the Robo-Smasher targeting Megatron? Had it really gotten the mech once already? That… made all of this more complicated than it needed to be. "Shockwave contacted a mining firm to dig the machine out of the underground for him, he wanted to study it. That was _vorns_ before a mech claiming the designation Megatronus hit the death-match gladiator rings like a grenade. No further records about the discovered machine from the beginning days of Cybertron were recorded, but before a search team was dispatched to ensure the scientist was still functioning he returned to his post without comment on what had delayed him."

"Is that all you got?"

"You want honesty? Okay."

(ooo000ooo)

Greenlight was gaping at them. Zephyr patted her fellow femme on the shoulder joint. "It gets worse."

"How could that get worse?" The old military femme spluttered, horrified. "You're saying Megatron is the result of a miner mech being tossed into a _Quintesson_ machine that reprograms Cybertronians into the old battle-bot configuration of processing!"

"Some bot, or someone, is pulling the strings." Cinder shook her helm. "As skeptical as Shadow' is of that, there's been a method to the madness that Megatron wouldn't have done on his own."

"What's worse than a virus that targets a bot's moral coding and _Quintessons?_ "

(ooo000ooo)

"…and now you're taking orders. Like the Autobots take orders from a Prime."

" _I_ DO _NOT_ TAKE _ORDERS!_ " Megatron roared as he swiped the air again.

Shadowdancer swiftly moved her frame out of the way. He was getting better at catching on to where her vocalizer was coming from. She wasn't sure how much longer she could keep this up, but they needed the information.

"Yes you do. Every bot does, even I do. You wouldn't have gone after Kaon or Praxus without them. Alithex I can understand, Vos sure, there might even have been a reason for Simfur. But why go after cities that _supported your view_ and bolstered your ranks… unless they were built over something else you didn't want found. Kaon was built over the original site of the Quintesson stronghold, if the minibots dig it out far enough records of this machine might have gotten out. The only reason you went after Praxus is because that city had developed out of the first rebel base A3 and Beta used in the rebellion and could have some additional records stored away."

"My master is an original, I am his apprentice. _This is my war! I give the orders!_ "

Original? Original Thirteen, original frame class… miner? …or Original Seven Primes? Megatronus Prime had never been confirmed deactivated unlike the other six brother frames. She might have hit an unknown nerve cluster with her comment that set him off.

"Yet again, you're taking orders from a Prime."

" _The Fallen will rise again!_ "

Now it was time to get the _pit out of dodge_.

Twisting behind the mech, the Praxian kicked him in the back plates. The mech barely moved, but the push let her backflip over the twining cables of the Robo-Smasher even if Megatron now had a good idea of where she was now. Abandoning the idea of waiting the mech out, the now visible Shadowdancer bolted for the door.

Silentforce had finally pried it open, wide optics locked on the machine and mech occupying the room before the XO tackled her subordinate out of the way of the wires shot at the other SPARTAN. That also snapped the automatic doors shut, pinning the tendrils of flexible metal in place before it could reach either of them.

"I would suggest we leave, Silentforce. Now."

The defensive specialist nodded rapidly and followed her through the base. The stomping pedes of Decepticons closing in on their position told both SPARTANs that getting out was going to be harder than it needed to be.

Silentforce didn't have the stealth capabilities Shadowdancer did.

\V/

Refit all but tripped her way into the Decepticon splinter base after Quickgrip exchanged SPARTAN greeting protocols with the rusty looking stationed guards, ignoring the stares an Autobot medic was getting as she passed a number of mechs and a few femmes wearing the Decepticon faction insignia.

" _Cinder!_ You had better know where Shadowdancer is, _or by the Pit itself I'll reformat you into a glitch mouse!"_

" _Refit!_ So lovely to see you again, little femme!" The SPARTAN once known as Rook caught the ex-AI before she could barrel into her, spinning around the smaller femme and almost tossing her into a nearby chair. "Our indomitable XO is currently fighting her way out of the Decepticon base in Gygax with Silentforce. They had a small matter to clear up with Lord Meggsy before politely and respectfully taking their leave."

The combat medic gaped at her, and Cinder took the opportunity to power on before any more threats were made in her direction. Ratchet really had left a stamp on the youngest SPARTAN-Bot's CPU and berth side manners.

"But for right now, I need your help. My orders from Shadow' was to set this base up and make sure the bots she would send me are fully functioning. Problem, I'm no medic. Now, we've got Hook and Bludgeon, both who can do medical repairs in a pinch, but there isn't an actual medic trained Cybertronian here."

Refit snapped her mouth components shut. It was still silent in the previously _loud_ meeting room all higher ranking bots from whatever part of the Decepticon faction they hailed from had gathered to try and make sense of why and how they were there, and continued to be so for an entire breem even when Blurr stopped dead in the doorway and had to be pushed inside by Galeforce.

"She is to report to me the fragging _astrosecond_ she gets back. I don't care if you need her to declare the proper chain of command, give whatever brief, or is needed to solve any problem. If she isn't in whatever medical bay this slag heap has less than an joor after escaping the city, I'll not only reformat you into that glitch mouse. I'll also find a cyber-cat to hunt you until Cybertron _implodes_. Understand?"

Having nothing to say in the face of that, Cinder only nodded.

"Then show me to the medical bay. There had better be halfway decent tools here."

(ooo000ooo)

Blurr shot Quickgrip a wide opticed look as the SPARTAN snuck in after Refit left the large room in a huff. The close-quarters combat specialist shrugged. "Fit's kinda attached to Shadow'."

The fastest mech on land then turned to the 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots, who rolled his optics at the both of them. "You're now excused. Thanks for the help getting out here."

Blurr didn't even wait for Quickgrip to say goodbye to his brother, splitting out of there fast enough to leave only an afterimage in his place.

"I don't think he likes Decepticons."

"Well, considering we had to rescue him from being deactivated by a number of them, I think he's excused." Galeforce carefully suppressed his snickers, smoothing out his vocalizer to keep any of the touchy military bots now staring their way from thinking he was laughing at them. "Back to Yuss, soldier. Good work."

Quickgrip snapped off a salute and followed the path his neutral mech had left in the crowded halls.

Galeforce turned back to the room filled with Decepticons. "One-two-seven, one-four-four, report."

Cinder snapped her own salute off as she recovered from being threatened by the normally pleasant ex-AI. "Sir. As per orders by the Third in Command, this base was commissioned from the Constructicons if possible and was to be constructed by any inbound personnel if not. Completion by Constructicons is still pending, the lower level is still unfinished, but the base is fully operational."

"By my own orders, I collected any sane and still functioning neutrals and prior military bots along with who I could find in Polyhex's Darkmoor." Orpheus' own salute wasn't anywhere near as crisp as the other two, but was still recognizable as a gesture of respect to a superior officer. "All total, I brought approximately six hundred mechs and femmes from the previous military of Cybertron with me. As well as four previous Decepticon soldiers, one of who is a gestalt of three."

Galeforce nodded, inwardly amused at the expressions on the faceplates of more than a few bots in the room. "Sideswipe, Sunstreaker?"

"Nothing to add, sir." The silver twin chipped in, echoed by a firm nod from his brother.

Now having confused an intimidated a number of bots there, the 2IC figured his duty there was done. Warcry was going to _love_ hearing this. "Understood. One-nine-six is still inbound. Once he arrives, your orders are to extract three-four-one and three-three-seven by any means necessary. We just had to replace the Second in Command, SPARTANs, let's not have to do that with the Third."

Galeforce executed a sharp about face and walked out. Cinder had passed to him on the comm lines that the next level down had the medical bay and was where Refit was likely to be.

(ooo000ooo)

Starscream and half the aerial contingent of the Decepticon Armada arrived just on the heels of Trickflip.

The infiltrator pinned the Decepticons' Aerial Leader with a less than impressed look when he landed near the SPARTAN mech standing in plain sight. "I was in Kaon, you were in Gygax. How in the _pit_ did I beat you here?"

The seeker sneered, uneasy at the look of the decimated Tarn and this cleared stretch of space in the middle of it. "None of your slagging business."

"Enough. Orders from on up top, Trick. We're going after Shadow'." Cinder slapped the other SPARTAN on the shoulder plates, followed by Orpheus, the twins, and Galeforce. "Screamer, the Constructicons have a hanger plan for your fly bots but they need your input to finish it off. They're below!"

Thundercracker raised an optic ridge as all six bots made quick tracks out of view. "That… sounds a lot better than the abandoned wing of Gygax's base we were given to use."

"Hooray for you." The eleven seekers turned around to see exactly what had spoken. Another SPARTAN-Bot was standing in an opening camouflaged in the base of a destroyed building, their device on her arm plating. "I have conducted repairs on a number of seekers, including Quicksilver of the Seeker Council and Drax the Aero Division Commander. You now have no excuse to miss a repair session. Get your thrusters in the repair bay, _now_."

Starscream drew himself up, squaring off with the femme. "And you are?"

"My designation is Refit, SPARTAN-Bot battlefield medic. And unless you think in that fragged up CPU of yours you are better than a SPARTAN seeker or more threatening than our own officers, _move your aft to my slagging bay_."

\V/

"This is _insubordination!_ If we were still part of the UNSC, I'd have your afts up on _charges!_ "

"Shut up ma'am!" Cinder cheerfully called back, knowing Shadowdancer was more irritated that she had to be rescued than that they had come back for her.

The XO had planned on that, after all. It might have taken joors of time for them to come back to support her, but they were here and gave her the operational support to extract them all anyways.

It was the fact she was getting irritated that Silentforce needed a more direct extraction than she had planned on doing by herself, and that she did need his help getting out of the confrontation with Megatron, that was twisting the Praxian's wires. That, and the banter was confusing the pit out of the Decepticons trying to offline them as their very torqued leader was shouting for the whole base of 'Cons to do.

There was also the small matter of a number of the bots in the chain of command missing, who had for some reason disappeared from Gygax completely, that might have added to Megatron's irritation over this longwinded and deadly game of hide and seek.

Maybe.

Galeforce was covering the bodyguard specialist's back plate as they tag teamed out of the shot up wing of the base Silentforce and the XO had gotten cornered in, the only two unable to fade from view like their Covert ops typed brethren.

Trickflip and Orpheus were keeping the Cons occupied and distracted, alternatively attacking from various opposite angles to draw off the press of fire while Sideswipe and Sunstreaker were currently forcing a few doors open where they hadn't been previously, and Shadowdancer and Cinder were 'pretending' the XO was still pinned with one other bot in a dead end hallway.

"Why the frag can't 'force obey a plan, anyways?" The Praxian growled out loud as she yanked her shotgun out of the deactivated frame falling in front of her. That one had gotten closer than she liked.

"Isn't there some cliché about plans and meeting the enemy? I think he's a walking example of it."

Before Shadowdancer could return some quip, the silver swordmech popped his helm around the new corner the SPARTANs had made for the Decepticons. "We're though, ma'am!"

{ _Comms, Silver! The rest of you fall back. We're pulling out._ }


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies if you left me a comment on the later chapters before I restructured the story, but editing it all on this site meant deleting a few chapters and the comments at the same time.

Since they had just blown out of Gygax proper, the SPARTANs were forced to take the long way around to Tarn to prevent anyone from either catching up or lying in wait to ambush them.

The long way being a trek over the barren and desolate wasteland that surrounded the Decepticon held city/state, in bipedal mode and running without lights.

The former alien SPARTANs had little problems, their optics were calibrated to work off low level light and provide an estimated layout of their surroundings. It was something they were used to, operating when they either couldn't risk additional lights or when there were none to be had.

Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had a bit more of a problem with that.

Cybertron was a planet that did not have much in the way of dark areas. There was the deep underground, which was dark simply because the minibots had only mapped and explored a percentage of the labyrinth so far in their functions, and the uninhabited areas that lingered in the far reaches between major cities.

Everything else on the planet of mechanical life forms was lit either by the nearest major metropolis or by the winding roads and highways that laced over the surface of the planet.

Unfortunately, Tarn was a city that had been destroyed. The farther the ragged group of bots got from Gygax, the less light there was. Even the highways did not give off the usual amount of light, no bot had ventured to Tarn since the vorn after it had been wiped out so those lights had been turned off to conserve power to more well-traveled routes.

Added to the light level problem of Cybertronians, the mechanical race itself very rarely relied solely on the optical pickup their optics gave them.

As Sideswipe realized when Clearsight had showed him her optical camouflage, Cybertronians had a reliance on the broadcasted signals and radars that sometimes severely limited them. The lack of _anything_ the swordmech would have normally used to guide himself by was throwing him off, to the point he had to use the glowing energon leaking from Silentforce's frame to ensure he was still following his new unit's XO to where she wanted them to go.

Sunstreaker merely used his twin, making Sideswipe rather paranoid he would lead them both astray.

Even if the silver mech could use the defensive strategist's slow energon leaking to keep them both straight, that didn't account for the terrain they were traversing.

They were off-road, something ground bound Cybertronians tended to avoid just for the sake of their tires.

Leaving Gygax's territory and entering Tarn's meant the terrain got even rougher, as the landscape had not been maintained or smoothed in the near centivorn since the city fell.

The closer they got, the more old debris they started having to maneuver around.

Sideswipe hadn't heard what destroyed the old city of architects, but whatever it had been had at least been _violent_.

There were massive, twisted pieces of old buildings thrown clear across the territory of Tarn. The swordmech knew that for a fact since they had to climb through one to keep the heading the SPARTAN-Bots' tactician had set for them.

Shadowdancer had also posted Cinder and Orpheus to the rear of their formation, the saboteur was less damaged overall and could probably react faster than the rest of them and the assassin had ducked out of view before the silver mech could get a look at what might be malfunctioning on him.

For the XO herself, there was a nasty and still slightly sparking hole though one doorwing added to a few nicks caused from blaster fire shorting out her shields. Sideswipe was sure there was more damage on her than that, but again he couldn't see it if there was. She had spent more than two joors playing tag and keep away with Silentforce's frame against the more rabid Decepticons, any of the worst damage would probably be internal stresses or malfunctions that wouldn't be obviously visible.

Silentforce had endured the worst of the cosmetic damage so far, the larger mech was still leaking even a full joor after making their own way out of Gygax despite Megatron attempting to pin them down for deactivation. He had yet to do anything the silver half of the twins would call complaining, even if he had taken on the worst of the fighting for the Praxian femme.

Cinder and Trickflip both were less damaged simply by the grace of showing up late to the scuffle, same as the native Cybertronian split-sparked twins.

Galeforce had acquired a bit more damage than they had, simply because he couldn't duck out of view when it seemed as if he was going to be pinned. The 2IC had fixed them all up the best he could once they were clear of the Decepticon held city, but the mech wasn't a medic and the more finicky repairs still needed to be seen to.

The combat engineer couldn't find where the bodyguard was leaking from still, and the SPARTANs had concluded either Refit would have to be consulted for that or the sealant in their fuel lines would have to stop that on it's own.

Refit was going to pitch a fit that would be worthy of Ratchet.

Sideswipe grinned ruefully when he realized that even halfway across Cybertron, he and his brother weren't going to escape without a wrench or two possibly chucked at their helms for getting damaged.

"I would dearly love to know what the frag is so funny." Cinder pitched her vocalizer low, to prevent the sound from carrying farther than they would like.

Sideswipe's optical pickup might not be very good, but the SPARTANs could see a bit more than he could.

"Refit's going to have a fit."

The one still operable doorwing on the XO twitched, the other sparked again when it tried to follow preprogramed behavior. "Slag…"

"How long do we have, Shadow'?" Galeforce asked, dryly amused at this little situation.

"Less than a joor and a half before we reach the Tarn base." She responded, flexing two of her still operating claws and getting a protesting gear grind from the other three. "She's not going to be happy…"

 _{Stalling will do us no favors either.}_ Silentforce chipped in, poking the trail of energon still leaking from his chest plate dispassionately. _{Suck it up, three-four-one. Preferably before I start leaving a trail an optic-less glitch mouse can follow.}_

\V/

The first thing Knightblade did was run a system check, ensuring she was still completely there.

Then she looked for both Perceptor and Wheeljack, to ensure they didn't come to harm poking at her generator.

The scientist levelly stared back, allowing his assistant to ensure both he and the inventor were functioning. "Your rather illogical uncertainties over the detrimental probability of our encountering misfortune in the remaining investigations we are yet to conduct should now be addressed. Both Wheeljack and myself are still operating as before, calm yourself."

"You know Percy, that's probably the most longwinded reassurance I've ever heard." The sniper informed him, swinging herself upright and pressing a hand to the part of her chassis they had opened up while she was out of it. "A 'we're fine' would have worked just as well."

"Wouldn't be Percy if he didn't give reassurances in the wordiest way possible." Chipped in the engineer, still fiddling with a stack of data pads. "But come here and check this out, Knight'."

Slipping off the medical berth Perceptor maintained for what damage a scientist normally might run into on occasion, the SPARTAN femme warily looked over the information the two mechs had compiled while she was offline as Spotter updated her as to what seemed to be going on with the 3IC. "What the slag?"

"Kind of strange, isn't it?"

Knightblade blinked her optics at him, then at what she was supposed to be reading. "Oh… no, Shadowdancer's just done something either stupid or suicidal… but this isn't all that great news either, for that matter."

Generators weren't exactly standard issue, and there was a reason for that beyond sheer difficulty in installment.

They used the power of a Cybertronian spark to create more power, and that did strain the spark itself to both provide the seed power for generating more as well as provide the usual energy to key systems.

A Cybertronian spark was super condensed energy, in nature… or at least that was the assumption the majority of the SPARTANs would prefer to go with.

All that it did was still questionable, but it did sustain the bare necessities of a robotic organism by itself if need be. Using some of that energy for something it wasn't designed to support was degrading the concentration of energy in the SPARTANs' sparks, at a rate any Cybertronian would find alarming but a human would have found slow.

SPARTANs, even before their encounter with the Cybertronian All-Spark, weren't exactly built to last either. Their armor was built to be replaced either in sections or completely, and the biological super soldiers themselves were designed to endure a massive amount of damage and trauma… but there had been little thought spared for exactly how long said soldiers would be able to live naturally when the SPARTAN-II program had been established and even less concern given to the class-IIIs.

The class-IIs might just be built to endure everything if at all possible, but the class-IIIs were never expected to live past a stellar cycle or two, one or two human decades, of use.

According to both Perceptor's and Wheeljack's findings, the SPARTAN-Bot's generator-turned-spark-chamber was draining some respectable amount of energy from their sparks.

Which in turn made a SPARTANs' spark a bit weaker in comparison with even Perceptor's, and he was older than most mechs still functioning.

The All-Spark apparently hadn't been all that concerned with how long its appropriated soldiers were able to function as well.

Knightblade wondered how many of them, exactly, would bother to do something about this.

On one servo, more power meant they could operate more than any standard Cybertronian frame type and in the middle of a war that was an edge a SPARTAN probably wouldn't want to give up. On the other, there was no telling how long this 'civil' war would go on and the SPARTAN-Bots themselves might not have the time to cover all of it before their sparks shorted out from this stressing.

Heaped on top of that, humans were not designed to live forever… and a Cybertronian generally lived for however long they wanted before the war started.

They might just view it as a human would, for death was inevitable for organics and something the SPARTANs knew like an old friend.

The marksfemme knew for a fact Clearsight was getting tired of her function, the scout not really tempted to build up relations or connect with another Cybertronian because she was more used to being alone and then returning to the SPARTANs for whatever social needs she had. Sending the twins to learn from her had only assuaged some of that, but that SPARTAN femme probably would be one of the ones that regarded this spark decay as a good thing.

As the lieutenant in charge of scientific findings for the SPARTANS, Knightblade made the executive decision to upload the information and give it over to only four bots.

Warcry, Galeforce, Shadowdancer, and Refit.

If those four couldn't find a way to ensure the SPARTANs would at least address the issue, the sniper would then inform Ratchet of that.

She was pretty sure he already had a copy of this, given that Wheeljack was his best friend.

"Knight'?"

The sniper looked over at the inventor's question. "Hmm?"

"Well?"

"How do we get around this?" She asked of them both, since neither looked all too alarmed at the situation with her spark generator.

"Utilizing the same method of transference for new-sparks, we may safeguard your own into another casing while uninstalling the generator inflicting the eminent impairment." Perceptor informed her in Wheeljack's stead, a slightly thoughtful frown on his faceplates. "Although the standard technique calls for limited duration of exposure for one's spark, I fail to hypotheses a method to circumvent the necessity of two, barring any unforeseen complications, such occasions for each of your cohort."

"So risky but possible?" Knightblade paged through the new information, looking at the energy readings. "And only if we really wanted to give the generators up."

"They're not exactly helping you." Wheeljack informed her, a greenish yellow tinge to his vocalizer fins. "Why wouldn't you change them out for something less… draining?"

"Can you match what our generators crank out with anything on the market now?" Asked the sniper, tapping the specs the generator she had seemed to possess. "I can give it up, probably. I sneak around and make long-distance shots, I _don't_ need my combat abilities so often as a sniper. The twins are able to work with our camouflage and upgrades easily enough without this, I'll just have a higher energon intake like them in the end. A few of the others? They _need_ that extra power to operate as they have been for where they live or do. Anything else would put them in even more risk than they tempt now."

Perceptor processed that, then looked over the specs he and the inventor compiled again for the reference. "Knightblade, must I profess an interest in how you foresee this situation resolving. You held a disinclination for the necessary procedure of investigating this feature of your remarkable frame type, to the point of implementing nearly peculiar measures to forestall the procedure. The current behavior you now exhibit lends itself greatly to such measures being more than likely to stave off a consequence more than the professed concern over any difficulty we may have faced in such exploration of retooled hardware."

"I was worried over any risk you might have faced, true, but that wasn't all of it. This is not going to go over well, if that's what you're asking." His assistant informed him blandly. "For you all, anyways. We're probably not going to _care_ , Percy. A few will avoid the complication; Holdout and myself for sure, Shadowdancer probably will just for her Scraplet, Cinder and the trine _might_. A few more will end up doing nothing to solve this; Orpheus, Clearsight, maybe even Trickflip and Quickgrip depending. The rest? May or may not, depending on how they process where they'll be in four or five vorns for this to actually affect our continued functions."

Wheeljack looked to have locked up over that logic, but Perceptor frowned harder at her.

Knightblade could only shrug at them. "Then you have to add the rising energon costs in, which is already starting as surplus stores start drying up and the seekers aren't out gathering more. The longer this civil war goes on and less processing power goes into trying to solve that, the less likely most of Cybertron will want to play host to a number of non-original Cybertronians that need more power just to function than they do if we rid ourselves of the generators. It's… that's not going to be pretty, Percy."

"Conceivably, one would assume those that possess your frame type would endeavor to reduce the power draw your additional frame adaptations accrue." He countered calmly, but still turning that new issue over in his processors. "Additionally, a few modifications could be contrived to reduce the requirements any individual SPARTAN would require in terms of energy in event of the conversion to a lesser inhibiting generator or spark chamber is attempted."

"Such is the reason I'm out here." She agreed with a short nod. "If at all possible, it's my job to figure it out for us."

The scientist accepted that with an incline of his own helm. "Then we have now devised our subsequent inquiry before us, efficiency of Cybertronian construction and adaptations your cohort can adapt and utilize. Follow once you are stable, Knightblade, and we shall establish a method of approach to surmount such a difficulty."

She hummed an agreement, optics wandering back to Wheeljack as the older mech left them to it. "'Jack? You okay?"

"Err… how mad at me will you be if I told Ratch' all of that?"

"I kind of expected you to, why?"

The inventor fiddled with some of the tools he and Perceptor had used to open up the SPARTAN's generator casing. "Well… he knows… all of it… I sent him a data packet like… two astroseconds ago…"

"So does Warcry now, your point?"

Wheeljack flashed her an optic blinding ripple of blue, green, and purple from his vocalizer fins. "Just asking. So… sore, shorts, anything off so far?"

Knightblade looked down at herself, examining the black frame paint that had been painted over a few seams and cracked open in order for the two mechs to examine one of the last few SPARTAN frame features left to poke and prod. "Other than a need to get repainted? Not really."

"Speaking of," the inventor started as he replaced the tools still out, "you ever think to just leave the underframe bare? I mean, it's not so much of an issue now that most of Cybertron knows you are SPARTAN."

"I'm not exactly sure if I want to be that shiny…" Then again, Cybertron either had metal cityscapes or desolate and abandoned reaches where the gleam of metal was normal. The sniper turned that suggestion over in her CPU, still inspecting the black that made her bluish gray armor plates stand out. "I'll think about it."

If the Decepticons Shadowdancer hadn't absconded with ever attacked Crystal City, being shiny might actually help the sniper blend in better with the crystal spires that gave the city its name.

\V/

Kynaite, by the grace of his carrier-creation bond with the Praxian femme, knew first.

Zephyr had a fair bit of difficulty trying to keep him out of the way of this resorting of Decepticons, which seemed to resolve around Soundwave and Greenlight. The youngling finally wiggled his way free of the helicopter and bolted as fast as his undersized pedes could carry him to the entrance of the subterranean base.

Refit, since she was included into the SPARTAN-Bots' network uplink, knew next.

She very calmly placed her diagnostic tool down so Bludgeon could continue compiling a basic record of what Skywarp would need in the way of repairs, then headed for the same place the youngling had dashed off to. Before she left the new, if bare, medical bay she pointed a finger joint in Hook's optics. "If I were you, I would keep your helm low and hope the Praxian femme about to pass through doesn't notice you. She'll be a little torqued at the engineer that preformed a highly illegal upgrade on the sparkling she adopted…"

The smallest Constructicon scowled, mostly in confusion, as she left. "What?"

Soundwave noted both the adoptive youngling's and the medic's movements, correctly assuming the SPARTANs had returned. He was, however, more than a little busy attempting to wrest control of the newly uprooted Decepticons to just abandon his work to see if the Praxian femme that enabled this to happen was still functioning. Instead, he sent Lazerbeak and Ravage in his place.

The cassette report of her continuing function, though reassuring was also alarming.

He did break off the mild argument with the former Ancient Council femme to see for himself, how much damage she had accrued attempting to engage Megatron in dialogue in order to gather more information.

SPARTANs were an ill-kept secret, currently. Their unit leader might have ripped the covering off them a short while ago, but his unhelpful advice for locating one simply caused confusion.

Most of Cybertron knew they existed, if not who each one was or where they were located. The SPARTANs themselves were unhelpful in that, either ducking around any attempts to be interviewed or pulling off feats thought impossible _then_ ducking any attempts to clarify what had gone on.

Nitro's explosive defense of Simfur, Rook's army training for Praxus, the fall of Vos itself, and the upset of the normal Decepticon habits in destroying Kaon; it all either reassured those that wanted to be or alarmed those that expected more to go wrong before any effort was put into setting Cybertron to rights.

That behavior had only heightened curiosity about them, in either approval or horror for what they were and represented.

Eight of those much gossiped about SPARTANs drew attention, no matter the damage they sported or what they were in the middle of. Refit might not be a combat unit, only a medic with some combat capability if needed, and Kynaite might still yet be a youngling; but the other five former human super soldiers turned Cybertronians and their newest recruits could turn helms if they wished.

Given that Refit didn't seem to care who overheard her screeching about the lack of processing power that possessed the Praxian tactician to confront Megatron on her own, the silence that started from the main stairwell and radiated out to every last Decepticon was understandable.

Soundwave got in range himself to hear Shadowdancer's response.

"Look, 'fit, we needed the intel." The femme felt one of her chevron spires, her claw catching on the crack that went through the left spear of blue crystal that made up part of her sensory array. "I will never do that again, I assure you. Damn mech didn't even budge when I kicked him, so I'll evade and leave it up to heavier built bots to knock old Meggy off his fragged up perch."

Trickflip who had applied pressure on one of the more visible leaking lines on Silentforce for the medic, looked over to her at that. "What did you get, anyways?"

"He's getting orders, but then again we suspected that." Shadowdancer huffed, shifting Kynaite a bit more up her frame to prevent him from sliding down. "Fragger's glitched to the Pit and back in his processors, and a few other bits and pieces."

"Orpheus, introductions please?" Greenlight had apparently not been content to wait for Soundwave to return to continue their discussion, the once former military femme leveled an expectant look on one of the so far silent mechs.

In response the assassin gave her a shrug. "Emerald, meet Shadowdancer."

Rescuing the youngling, the former 3IC of the Decepticon Armada inspected the ancient femme again.

"Real helpful, that."

Orpheus sneered in return, grudgingly accepting the medic poking at a few oil leaks on his own frame.

"What he meant to say is Shadowdancer, Third in Command of the SPARTAN-Bots and Tactical Lieutenant." Interjected the Praxian femme in exasperation, turning to the slightly rusty military bot. "I would shake your servo but mine are malfunctioning. Whom am I addressing?"

"Former Ancient Councilmember Greenlight."

"…weren't you deactivated a few vorns ago?"

The femme gave a dismissive shrug. "Quite possibly; there were rumors to that effect, but as far as I know I'm not."

Shadowdancer acknowledged that point rather gracefully. "Apparently so. Refit, stop poking that."

The medic glared, poking the left doorwing once again. "You need _replacement parts_. Where in the slag are we going to get those out here? We're in the middle of nowhere!"

"Make a list and pass it on to Holdout. The trine will transport it out here with the _ATHENS_ once she gets what you need." Galeforce answered for their 3IC, in a thoughtful vocalizer setting. "Speaking of, we're about to host the better part of the seeker council… just so you all know."

"Hailstorm heard already?"

"Lightning did and passed it on, before Drax could tell them himself."

Shadowdancer nodded, her part of the uplink damaged with her chevron spire ensuring she only got half of the reports Galeforce was getting. Since that was also the excuse she was using to buy Soundwave time to grab control before having to explain to Warcry what the frag was going on, the Praxian wasn't too upset by that. "How many seekers did we get away with?"

"A bare hundred." Starscream shoved his way through scowling rather hard at the ground pounders in his way. "More than two-thirds of those that defected to Lord Megatron's side. When is the council due in, femme?"

"They'll be following the _ATHENS_ here, so when Drax has Refit's required materials. Speaking of, Greenlight, if you have anything major needed for your own bots compile it quickly. Soundwave, Starscream, same for you two."

" _ENOUGH_." Refit glared around at the passel of mechanical figures, rather insistently digging her hand into Shadowdancer's armor. "They are in need of repair, move now or I start throwing wrenches."

\V/

Ankmoor was a city of data analysts.

Obviously they compiled information and distributed it so any bot across Cybertron could access it if needed, but that also meant they generally went through more of it that the average Cybertronian did.

From the general take of the current office rumors and gossip, Clearsight knew she would probably be asked to leave within a decacycle.

It wasn't so much the SPARTAN thing, though that probably didn't help her, as the frequent interruptions to the Hall of Records' normal orn to orn routine when the reporters and simply curious bots attempted to get in and talk to the scout.

The problem with Ankmoor wasn't the volume of information, it was how much of that information they actually stopped to read through themselves.

It was almost depressing, how little her fellow data analysts actually comprehended of the situation besides the basics. Clearsight was one of those much talked about SPARTANs no matter how much she refused to confirm that, yes, but she was also stationed in their city for the protection of the civilians that called it home. Given that the city was separated from the current troubles by both a sea comprised solely of acid on one side and a massive amount of terrain on the other, they perceived themselves rather safe.

The scout would like to point out that by that logic any attack on Iacon never should have happened, but she wasn't sure if that point would be listened to if any bot knew where it came from.

Since Clearsight _was_ a scout, confrontation wasn't quite her forte. She could fight, any SPARTAN could hold their own if need be, but that was more combat skills than social necessities.

Additionally, she wasn't very sociable in the first place.

Just leaving was looking more and more like what she would prefer to do, but she also had her SPARTAN orders to heed to.

Then again, it wasn't like she needed this job anymore…

Spotter and Knightblade were pretty much able to keep up with any additional inquires, and if another SPARTAN had a burning question they could damn well look it up themselves. Clearsight had a tidy sum set away just because, built up over a vorn of steady work and little cost to herself, and semi-regular shipments of mid-grade energon the _ATHENS_ still produced would take most of the cost of living away.

She could take a break, it would cut down on the interruptions anyways. Maybe even find something better to do with her time as she fiddled her thumb joints waiting for an attack that may or may not happen.

The next time some bot got pass the security checks and subjected her to prying questions, the SPARTAN femme merely smiled.

Then she got up, located her supervisor and informed him icily, "If you cannot prevent such harassment happening every _damn joor_ , this is not someplace I wish to work. I quit."

Clearsight rather happily abandoned him to the spluttering mech that tried to question her, making her way out of Ankmoor's Hall of Records at a fast clip.

Screw that fragged up slag.

\V/

Warcry's expression was pretty much unhelpful for clarifying what he had just dropped on the laps of the last Autobot Prime and his command staff.

Ratchet had his hands full with Prowl, seeing as the Praxian mech had crashed from the rather blunt interjection of _what_ the SPARTAN-Bots' 3IC had been up to for the last vorn, and Jazz was torn between concern and a horrified variation of glee. Ultra Magnus and Elita-One were staring at the tank, Ironhide with less blatant confusion stamped across his faceplate.

What made Optimus feel old was that _Red Alert_ had taken that calmly.

"Warcry, can you go over that again?"

"It doesn't get any better, Prime." The once human SPARTAN sighed heavily, running a massive hand across his faceplate. "From what Galeforce can see, and he's got pretty much an optic full being that he's down there now, Shadowdancer and Orpheus have pretty much ripped the support struts out of the Decepticon Armada. Not only that, but Orph's got all the remains of the previous Cybertronian Military that had either migrated or got stuck into Polyhex for being prior military."

That got Ratchet's attention rather fast. " _REFIT'S_ down there?"

"Yeah, that's why Shadow' wanted her to meet up with her and the other Covert Ops bots last. From what Gale's reported so far, there _isn't_ an actual medic between them all. That pretty much stuck 'fit as their current CMO, until they actually get a medically inclined bot down there. So far all they got are engineers and a few bots that picked up minor repair skills over their functions." Twitching, Warcry's expression finally changed to slightly confused. "And I thought Greenlight was deactivated?"

"Rumors pinned the frame claimed to be hers as actually being that of a close femme friend and bodyguard." Red Alert chipped in almost manically, rapidly reviewing something on one of his many data pads. "It might not actually be the once Ancient Councilmember herself but that double, or it could be and she just laid low for a time, or-"

"We get it, Red. Cool yer jets, mech." Jazz tapped his four claws on the conference table they were gathered around, watching as Prowl's battle computer and CPU were rebooted. "What does Shadow' think will happen from dis?"

The tank merely shrugged again. "Whatever happens is now up to Prime and whoever takes control of the splintered Decepticons. They should be amendable to peace talks and non-violent confrontations at the very least. However, that still leaves the bots in Gygax and Polyhex, not to mention Kaon, who might not all appreciate the brutal parts of this civil war getting extinguished on them. More than half of them, Jazz, are victims of that virus that went around. The question should be what to do with them… and Megatron."

Ultra Magnus managed to respond next, even though his confusion. "What's wrong with Megatron then?"

Warcry glanced at him, then to where Prowl was pulling himself back upright. "Brace yourself, Prowl."

"That did not assist me the first time, I highly doubt it will aid me on this one." Even so, the Praxian mech did remain slightly hunched over so if his battle computer overloaded again it would make for a shorter trip.

"Shadowdancer and Silentforce got optics on a piece of Quintesson machinery Megatron had been using to reprogram difficult bots into a more sympathetic frame of processing for his aims. And then my risk taking, reckless Third managed to talk him into a spitting rage to confirm he's taking orders from some bot."

Optimus frowned behind his battle mask. "Who?"

The SPARTAN-Bot Commander held up a finger joint as he passed the question on and it took a breem, which Prowl used to stave off another crash, for him to answer again.

"From what Shadow' told Gale', Megatron said; _The Fallen will rise again!_ "

Something went _POP_ under the Praxian mech's helm, but other than a painful flinch the tactician didn't crash again. Straightening up now that, hopefully, the worst was over, Prowl gave the tank a slight frown. "Does she know the identity of this _Fallen_ referenced?"

"Depends really. If it's in reference to the Seven Original Primes, then it could be Megatronus Prime. If it's in reference to the Original Thirteen, then who knows. Again for the original miner frame class, for his frame type, for whatever he wanted it to mean. All Shadow' managed to confirm was that he was taking orders, this one giving the orders was original at something, and whoever it might be is probably a 'fallen' bot."

"So just to make this a little clearer, we now have _two_ Decepticon factions?" Elita-One asked archly, looking between their Prime and the SPARTAN-Bots' Commander. "Does no one else see an issue here?"

"Elita-"

"Prime, they're _Decepticons!_ "

"So is Orpheus." Warcry informed her blandly. "Shadowdancer's planning on joining once everything is sorted out. I think Silentforce and Trickflip will follow her, but Cinder might just go back to Praxus or come here instead."

" _Ah_ was ah 'Con, femme." Jazz rather pointedly interjected, tapping a rhythm out on the table. "Once, anyways. Not now, but dat's not ta point. Decepticon don't mean evil, ya know. Some of 'em just wanted ah different way, but when no one wanted ta give 'em it dey went deir own way."

Optimus gave a nod of recognition to the saboteur. "They are still Cybertronians, Elita-One."

"Some of them might have committed war crimes, but you wouldn't judge them all for the actions of the crazy ones, would you?" Warcry simply shrugged at that. "You've got a choice between the crazy bots that will attempt to shoot you for the petty crime of being Autobot, and the ones that while might not be all that pleased with Cybertron's usual working would at least talk with you before reaching for a gun."

\V/

Galeforce, being the only bot in the base with Autobot decals, stuck rather close with the rest of the SPARTANs.

Even if they were pretty much confined to the echoingly empty repair bay, due to Refit's insistence for getting a full look at the varied levels of battle damage on all of them, the combat engineer had a very good position to watch this splinter faction of Decepticons work out exactly who was in charge and what they wanted to do now.

Shadowdancer might have given them someplace of their own that wasn't rusted or falling to pieces and they might have once been military, but even vorns of time eking out a living as civilian bots left a mark.

Additionally, the SPARTAN-Bots' 3IC wasn't very interested in controlling this splinter faction herself.

Orpheus had found the remains of the Cybertronian military, all of those that didn't join the Autobots or were turned down for whatever reason, and they had their own expectations of how everything would go that didn't mesh with the Decepticon Armada bots of Soundwave's.

Greenlight and Bludgeon might have led them for the last couple vorns, but those old military vets just wanted their old, _clearly_ visible chains of command back again.

The former Ancient Council femme, who had hidden out for nearly a centivorn under the designation of the femme frame double that had guarded her for most of her service as a Councilmember and died in her place, was highly paranoid that the ones that bore the Decepticon faction insignia would go back to the business as usual operating procedures they had done under Megatron's lead. Her concerns tailed into Bludgeon's, who was highly doubtful even a _Decepticon Officer_ would know what to do in governing what amounted to a military base without excessive force or threats to keep order.

Starscream was neither helping or hindering, and none of the SPARTANs could or would figure that one out.

Soundwave's rather logical counters and arguments against the former Cybertronian Military General and the ex-gladiator were either aided by the seeker's pointed reminders of Gygax being ruled rather well without civilian interference and agreements that something different would probably prevent one bot from gaining control of everything and destroying them either through foolishness or madness. Then the former scientist would ruin any forward progress by demanding that 'something different' exclude the seekers since Starscream himself would handle his own frame set without interference.

Galeforce didn't have Shadowdancer's calculating processes, but he could bet on this taking more than a few cycles to work out.

Refit allowed the invasion into her domain only because the Praxian femme _was_ keenly interested in seeing how it would all work out, and without her following the medic the other SPARTANs lingered as well. While she allowed it, she gave them all some rather pointed threats of what she would do if any of the discussion woke those in recharge after having a few major malfunctions repaired.

The former AI was still waiting on Holdout to find or assemble the massive part of the desperately needed materials and parts, so those in the most desperate need were stasis-locked for the time being.

It was Sunstreaker though, obsessively vain and borderline psychotic mech that he was, who ended the argument. "Why not do all of it?"

Soundwave turned to the split-sparked twin and considered him. "Request: Clarify."

"Have this Greenlight handle the bulk of the city, you take the damn soldiers, and leaver Screamer the seekers." The gold mech, already rather surly due to the chips in his paintjob, gave the passel of bots an old fashioned look. "Do you _really_ want to bother with the orn to orn slag while also trying to figure out how to defend this pile of rocks?"

"I happen to like this pile of rocks." Cinder informed him dryly, pulling shattered shards of her left forearm plating out of a laser burned gash near her elbow joint. "But mech's got a point. There's going to be way too much slag to handle for one bot at first."

"Although we can cover the immediate major expenses, you are going to have to figure out how to earn credits for any further imports." Shadowdancer agreed with a measure of concern, wincing only a little when Refit finally managed to pry up the last of the melted metal holding her left doorwing in place. "And then there's ensuring the bots have enough to do to keep them happily at work, which would probably be figuring out how much of the city is still viable or not or salvage operations for getting the credits you'll need. To make it just that much more immediate, we need to figure out how to defend said pile of rocks when Meggie figures out where we are and tries to deactivate us all for giving him such a snub."

" _Rebuilding_. I fragging _hate_ rebuilding." Trickflip opinioned from a berth away, replacing a few burnt out wires on his own frame while the medic was a little busy extracting the half-melted parts out of the 3IC's doorwing joints. "Can we not and say we did?"

He had to duck out of the way of Orpheus' swing at his helm.

The assassin merely glowered back at his sibling cohorts' looks for that action.

Soundwave considered that, then turned back to the bots who all had equal shares of concern about the leadership of the new Tarn base.

Greenlight shrugged, mostly with bemusement but not seeing a better way to handle it. Bludgeon glowered back, but turned his attention to mending the fractures Sideswipe had caused himself.

Starscream's attention wasn't on them, but directed more to the surface.

"Oh yeah." Galeforce nodded with a glance at the same direction. "Two of the seeker's Council is here. Have fun with that."

Refit scowled at the mech for that late announcement. "With my parts?"

"No, mostly the little things Holdout could buy in bulk. The more specialized parts and the bulk components are still being assembled for you, the _ATHENS_ will do another run when our dear tracker is done getting a hold of the rest of it." He nodded before the medic could demand anything, heading for the doors of the med bay. "I'll grab your supplies, don't worry so much 'fit."

(ooo000ooo)

Tigerstripe was only dwarfed by very few seekers, and usually the ones that were intended for interstellar travel on their own. For the seeker frame sets that weren't intended for such distances, he was pretty much the biggest aide of Lunais herself. Since his alt form was based off a troop transport, heavily armored and intended to cover long distances in short amount of time, that was self-explanatory.

Spotter, by comparison, was ridiculously tiny for a seeker. He had the alt form of a scout ship, built more for stealth and speed over defensive ability. That made him almost half the size of the largest SPARTAN seeker, and a few good helms shorter than even Starscream himself.

Drax, who had the most normal size for a Cybertronian of the same frame set as his alt form was more all-purpose than his trine mates, knew damn well his trine was a little unbalanced.

Spotter could use the _ATHENS_ for long distances, so the scout normally preferred piloting the ship… or navigating when _ATHENS_ did it herself. Tigerstripe normally preferred tailing the ship himself, to keep an optic on anything that might try to shoot at or inconvenience the Prowler Class transport. Drax usually led, because he was the trine's leader and therefore they had programming that made them want to defer to him.

Unbalanced they may be, but the SPARTAN seekers made it work.

The staring was getting a little old, though.

The faction of seekers that had split from the Aero Space Division stared even more when Refit happily bounded up to her creator and gave the recon scout a hug. "Spotter! I don't get to see you very often anymore."

Ignoring the stares, he merely hugged his creation back. "Refit, you look well. How's being a medic working out anyways? I didn't get to ask the last time we all met up, way too much slag was going on."

"It would be better if some bots would _stop_ avoiding us. But Ratchet's a good mech, and an even better medic. He's pretty much gotten me caught up on the experience side of my apprenticeship and I've only got a few more vorns to go until I'm ready for my own med bay." She beamed at him, then at the crates Tigerstripe was helping Galeforce move out of the _ATEHNS_ ' hold. "What do you got for me?"

"Mostly the rust treatments you wanted, but a lot of the stock parts and a few additional things Ratchet had passed on to Holdout the moment he heard where the slag you were. He's not happy, by the way."

Refit accepted that with a sigh. "I know, but hopefully with Shadow' and not me."

"Oh no, he's not happy with War' and Gale'." Spotter corrected her with a smirk. "For allowing you to be sent out without the proper time to prep. He claims Shadow' did the right thing in at least getting a mostly competent medic out here to see to any repairs, shockingly enough. He might want to quibble about the seniority of such medic, but admits you're pretty much the best out here right now."

"Hey, I didn't know we'd be stopping by here until Refit told me!"

"I didn't know why she wanted us to meet her here, myself." The medic informed the 2IC calmly. "So if Ratchet has to blame some bot, it's you and Warcry."

The combat engineer paused, trying to find a way to argue that. Tigerstripe merely shoved another crate on him instead, shoving the SPARTAN mech out of the way. Huffing, the 2IC hefted the supplies and showed the aerial tank the way into the base to store it all.

Refit bobbed a respectful nod to both Lightning and Whiteout, both of who had volunteered to accompany the SPARTAN trine out to Tarn to hear the grievances of the Decepticon aligned seekers. "Sirs, excuse me. But I have patients to see to."

Drax figured that wouldn't have helped these renegade seekers find their balance, so he waited for one or two of them to at least show some life.

It took a breem, during which Galeforce and Tigerstripe got the _ATHENS_ unloaded and the shipments squared away where Refit wanted them. Then, only after the combat engineer got shanghaied into helping the few minor medics and the only formally trained one conduct what repairs they could do and the aerial tank returned to the surface, did Starscream turn to the shortest SPARTAN seeker. "She's _your_ creation?"

"I programed her." Spotter unhelpfully informed him with a shift of his wing panels, a seeker variation of a shrug. "Then we… well, turned a bit metallic and it turned out my program had a frame and spark of her own. So yes, Refit's mine."

"Refit's questionable origin aside," Drax ignored the smack the scout gave him for that, "you had better have a good explanation for this, Starscream. I gave Shadow' the benefit of doubt when she claimed you did, but I would dearly like to hear it. Why did you deactivate Sentinel Prime and nearly get Silentforce killed?"

"Why would you take the word of a _Praxian_ over…" The former scientist trailed off with a scowl when all three SPARTANs tapped the unit insignia they all wore somewhere, even if it was on armor plates stored in the _ATHENS_ and not on them. "Frag it. Yes, I have reason. The rest have their own, and I'll leave it up to them if they tell you or not. I would like to know why the slag _you're_ the Air Commander."

"They wouldn't take no for an answer and I got stuck with it."

Starscream blinked his optics at them once.

"And you were trying to abscond with the whole to the side of a crazy mech." Drax added after another moment. "Who had a servo in what happened to Vos, or at least did nothing to prevent it."

"…point." Even Starscream had second thoughts about that, after the fact. Had he managed to completely take the Aero Space Division over and relocate the seekers to either Gygax or Polyhex, the former scientist wondered if Vos would have still fallen or not. Given what he had managed to scrounge up in the way of information, he was pretty sure it would have still happened.

"So personal?"

"Yes."

Drax nodded, then gave Tigerstripe a considering look. "Do you…?"

"Slag no, I'll stay out here." The massive seeker denied, shooting the ship a half-sparked glare. "I would swear the _ATHENS_ is shrinking just to make me ram my helm into some of the bulkheads for laughs."

"She's not shrinking, we've decompressed." Spotter denied, flicking his talon-like finger joints at the mech's own height and then at his own. "I'm still the same general size as when we came out of Cryo-Stasis, you've shot up a bit since then. I think the only other bot not to have shifted size when our frames shifted out are the femmes. She's actually a slight bit bigger, you just never noted because you're a lot bigger than before."

"Either way, the _ATHENS_ is too cramped for me." Tigerstripe repeated tetchily with a scowl.

Drax rolled his optics at the both of them. "Mute it already. Lightning, Whiteout? Conference room, the _ATHENS_ will guide you. Come on, Starscream. Let's get this the frag out of the way."

The scientist drew himself up, but the SPARTAN trine leader interrupted before he could vocalize anything.

"Bring your damn trine if you have to."

\V/

"What, exactly, is all this for?"

"Trust me, 'storm, you don't want to know just yet." Holdout informed him cheerfully, comparing the manifests with the list in her hands.

She didn't often get massive requests like this, it was normally one or two things the SPARTANs wanted shipped out to them. The last major thing she had a hand in was the weapon repair project shipping between Simfur and Praxus, but this was a whole lot better than arranging and managing some possibly illegal smuggling routes.

Shadowdancer had poured most of the credits she got into a bar at first, then she scrimped and saved up to fund a war effort later on.

Making the Decepticons fund a splinter cell was apparently amusing to their tactician, and since it _did_ work out like that the tracker was pretty amused by where the majority of the credits she was using had come from as well.

There was nothing quite as amusing as irony… and a long shopping list added in made Holdout happy.

The Praxian femme had dipped into that credit set aside for a war fund a few times, more notably for Titan and Bumblebee, but with what Rook had deposited before she left for their dear XO and what Trickflip had chipped in since yanking a few Autobots out of Kaon it was still a massive amount.

Holdout now had free reign to abscond with it and buy up a whole lot of slag, from what Refit and Ratchet wanted sent to Tarn to the orn to orn luxuries a small military base needed to keep tempers cool and the bored occupied. As well as all the other things any Cybertronian would think was part of usual living requirements, what little furniture and electronics that normally furnished a living unit and all the other little things most wouldn't think twice about where it came from.

"For now, most of it's going to a few medics that are in dire straits in terms of supplies." She continued almost absently, checking off the last of the bulk parts Refit wanted. The more specialized ones, a replacement for Shadowdancer's left doorwing and the less standard old variations of certain parts, were still pending and would have to be sent on later. "Mostly though, it's just something you're going to have to wait to hear about. The Autobots know what it's for, though. I've got a list from Ratchet himself to fill and send on as well."

Sandstorm shrugged at that, obediently lifting up the crate she had just finished overlooking so she could get at the next one.

"Move it mech, this needs to be done before the next time the _ATHENS_ gets back in a few joors."

He did so with a rueful sigh, wondering which of her cohort he would have to beg to never do this again. The triple-changer didn't mind the short shopping trips, but the massive ones were just all types of trouble.

"Uh… excuse me?"

Both the SPARTAN femme and the Wrecker mech blinked at each other, then turned to see who it was that had spoken.

The black and optic shorting bright _pink_ femme nervously waved the joints of her right servo. "Hello?"

"Hi. What do you want?" Holdout asked her bluntly, intending to quickly deal with her and get back to her work as fast as possible.

"Erm… I'm from the Central Hall of Records… the robology department. Can… are you the SPARTAN of Central City?"

The tracker blinked at her a few times. "Squeak! I haven't seen you in two cycles, femme. I was wondering if you gave up or not."

"Squeak?" She repeated, looking rather confused. "My designation is Myth."

"But you squeaked every fragging time I passed you, so I'm calling you Squeak." Holdout shrugged going back to her work. "What do you want, anyways?"

"Err… right." The newly nicknamed Squeak shifted nervously. "Umm… can I ask you some questions?"

"As long as you recognize that I reserve the right to not answer if I want." The SPARTAN in question responded almost absently. "Or just walk out like Clear' did not too long ago when harassed a time too many when she was _supposed to be working_."

"Yes, I… uh, got word of that. My coworker was apparently less than…"

"Tactful? Respectful? _Halfway decent of processing?_ " Holdout chipped in when Myth paused a bit too long. "We don't mind questions, we do mind harassment over something we cannot help."

Her cooling fans clicked on, and she squirmed slightly guiltily under Sandstorm's reproving look. "If you can pass on our apologies, the femme designated Clearsight has not been spotted in a few cycles…?"

"She's somewhere around that city, not too sociable in the first place that femme. And no, I'm not telling you where she's at now. Be glad you didn't try that with a few of the less _restrained_ ones, they would have been less pleasant in demonstrating their less than pleased outlook with you."

"Yes, well…" The femme seemed to try to brace herself, and when she was outweighed and outsized by both bots she was accosting, it was slightly amusing in a way. "I have been asked to verify or quantify a few things, since it seems as if you're all here to stay."

"Nope."

"What?"

Holdout checked a few more things off the data pad she had in hand, nodding to Sandstorm to move the next one in place to be checked. "A number of us don't intend to stay where we're at. Like Rook, a few are just waiting in case of attack in certain cities and either will split or will stay depending on what they want to do. I probably will wait another vorn or so then enlist in the Autobots, hopefully assigned back to the Wreckers if at all possible."

Myth floundered at that, but the tracker continued before she could get her processor wrapped around that.

"Then again, there's a few that want to return to the galaxy we originated from just to see if everything is worked out and figure out what the slag happened for sure. So a number of us might just disappear for good, depending on what they find. Of course, that'll have to wait until this war is over and done with. Heaped on top of that we're already down a SPARTAN in the bare vorn we've been here, Markmaker wasn't just an Enforcer he was one of ours, and it's possible we may just lose another few before the end of hostilities."

"W-what?"

The SPARTAN gave the poor femme a hard look. "Each city was assigned a SPARTAN for defensive reasons as we adapted to both this world and civilian life. Some bots are _harassing_ our soldiers, even if we've gone a vorn without violence or attempting to massacre the city assigned to us. Yes, some deactivations have occurred. Most notably in Crystal City when Knightblade came across the Scientist Perceptor being held against his will and about to be off-lined simply because of his beliefs in this war. Again when Galeforce went to the rescue of some Tyger Pax Crime Scene Investigators who came under attack from the same damn faction. Mostly, all of that has been _reactive_. And yet we're getting accused of what?"

"Warmongering, I think the latest rumor was." Sandstorm chipped in, getting back in range with the last crate Holdout had on hand to be checked. "Or willfully deactivating which ever bot gets in your way. One of those two."

"Inventive." His courted femme deadpanned, turning back to the cringing femme. "You get the point yet?"

Myth _gaped_ at her at first, then ground her dental plates together and _glared_ back. "That's not what I'm here for. I just wanted to ask you about these humans and their culture! I'm a robologist, not a rumormonger!"

"Then you're asking the wrong femme." Holdout shrugged dismissively. "Culture and history isn't my thing. The bots you should ask are Spotter, Clearsight, and Shadowdancer. Since both the seeker mech and the Praxian femme are a little caught up in something else, you're left with the scout. And _she's_ not all too happy with your methods of asking, so you're a little screwed on that end."

"I was sent to figure out how much of your original culture clashed with ours." The femme repeated herself sternly. "You are just as good as another. Although I do apologize for the behavior of my fellow researchers, I do not require an extensive database of all you know. I merely need to ask you a few things."

The SPARTAN waited a beat, but when the other femme merely gave her a pointed look back, the tracker smirked. "So you do have a spinal strut. Good for you, Squeak. Give us a bit, we'll go out for fuel and you can ask all the questions in that pretty little helm of yours."

Myth gave her a bewildered look. "But… wait, what? A-and my designation is _Myth_ , not Squeak!"

Sandstorm heaved a sigh, shrugging at her. "I highly doubt you're going to ditch that. What one SPARTAN knows, the rest of them usually do as well. They're _all_ going to call you that."

" _All_ of them?" She squeaked, then frowned and reset her vocalizer to prevent that from happening again. "So…?"

"Clearsight probably knows you're all sorry by now, but again that femme's not the best talker. I think, the one time I met her, she spoke all of three words to me." The Wrecker gave her another shrug.

"So… that means the Autobot Warcry _does_ know where all his soldiers are?"

"Generally, sure. Their exact locations? Not unless he specifically looks for it, and some of them probably only know their position and not what it's called."

Myth gave him a bland look. "So he wasn't lying, but not exactly telling the truth either?"

"What would you do with that information anyways?" Sandstorm asked in return, giving her a stern look of his own. "Should he have said he knew damn well where they all were? Some of them have contested cities to watch, would you justify their deactivations just so you can keep a paranoid optic on all of them?"

The femme scrunched up her faceplates in confusion. "I highly doubt-"

"Kaon. One almost got deactivated there with the old Prime, and another one got it assigned. That SPARTAN had to duck out a few times, because he got a few Autobot sympathizers out of there before they came to a bad end. You don't believe me? Look up two femmes by the designation of Flashfire and Ruby, those two and their youngling got escorted to Praxus one of those times the mech had to get out or risk more than just himself."

"Ruby and Flashfire? As in two of the bots that participated in the Praxus Rout?"

"Yep. The SPARTAN mech in Kaon took them to the SPARTAN femme in Praxus, since his city was too torn up to maintain a domicile. Rook took them in and let them function off her until they had the funds to support themselves, and then taught them to defend themselves in case of the worst."

"And this Rook made an army."

"Out of?"

Myth frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

"What were those army bots before Rook got hold of them?"

"There are no records-"

"Lies. There's records, if you dig far enough. Those bum bots and malfunctioning units Rook turned into a militia? Those are all down on their luck Cybertronians who once had jobs or purposes and yet under the press of time got booted either because another frame class bot could do their function better or because their jobs became obsolete. We ignored them, left them to rust. Rook gave them something to do again. And you all wonder why they flatly refuse to say anything bad about the femme."

She fidgeted with her finger plates, processing that. "Where are these records?"

"Some of them went up with Tarn, some of them are from other cities like Alithex. Others you have to go back _vorns_ for, like back during the height of the Golden Age." Holdout informed them both, subspacing her data pad and finally sealing the last of the crates to be sent to said destroyed city. "Unlike us SPARTANs, they didn't just appear from the neither fully functioning. Now, how about that fuel?"


	35. Chapter 35

_{Zero-four-six, three-four-one is now online.}_

_{Perfect, thank you AI. My toeing the line XO? REPORT.}_

Shadowdancer scowled at the medic's back plates, but gave the tactical uplink more of her processing power. _{Anything in particular you want to know about, sir?}_

 _{Oh you know, the ever loving_ frag _you've been up to. I'm keenly interested in your reasoning for it.}_

The tactician hesitated, then heaved the Cybertronian variation of a sigh. _{Where did you see this little war ending?}_

_{What?}_

_{Humor me. Go on and speculate.}_

Warcry blinked a few times, giving the data pad Galeforce had left with him another look. Yes, his XO had just asked that. _{Well… discounting the Decepticon faction, Cybertronians aren't a very warlike race. They were having trouble defending themselves before we ended up here, for frag's sake a few cities are blatantly ignoring the fact there's a war on and just continued business as usual.}_

_{Yes, we've seen that with Kaon, Vos, Simfur, and Praxus. Four cities, and what is being done to prevent such a thing from reoccurring outside of one-two-seven's army bots?}_

Sideswipe jerked his helm up, catching Sunstreaker's bored optics questioningly. His split-spark twin just shrugged, informing the swordsmech he didn't know.

Warcry handed the pad off to the Prime for his perusal of the conversation, giving his Third's question more of his attention. _{I don't think they've had the time-}_

 _{Nothing. There will be nothing done in response, zero-four-six. You and I, and most of the SPARTANs, know this.}_ Shadowdancer cast a glance to where Soundwave had moved the leadership discussion on Refit's behest, hammering out how the Tarn base would be run between three bots. _{They will make all sorts of excuses; we're not military built, we're not soldiers, we're not built for that, so on so forth. This abhorrence for military hardware most Cybertronians have will make them little more than target practice in the end. So far Praxus will probably be the only city to break that mold, and only because the preparations have been done already and they need not to do any more.}_

Cinder gave the Praxian femme a confused look of her own. _{What about the Autobots, then?}_

_{How many are there? Four, five hundred? Barely six, if I recall right and predict the recruitment numbers accurately. To protect how many Cybertronians, which I believe at last census was hovering around twenty thousand? Then the Decepticon faction, which have all those bots not taken census of, and they number near three thousand before I did this.}_

_{The military-no, I see your point.}_ Galeforce cast a glance over to the leader of half of Cybertron's old military set up. _{They're already split, and either report to Ultra Magnus or this Greenlight femme. That would just never end, and foster even more resentment to military bots.}_

The tank framed Commander of the SPARTAN-Bot Unit frowned heavily at the points. _{So slag will get tricky, I highly doubt Cybertronians as a whole will let themselves be deactivated just because-}_

His Third in Command interrupted again. _{That's human behavior. Humans will defend the stupidest fragging scrapheap if they think they have a good enough reason._ Cybertronian _, zero-four-six,_ Cybertronian _behavior and social norms would have them ignoring that unless something happens to change that assumption. Odds are, changing that assumption with either be lethal or scarring to the bot in question.}_

Knightblade, who had kept only half her attention on the discussion and more of it on Perceptor's initial layout for redesigning the SPARTANs' very mishmashed system additions, interjected next. _{What about my scientist here? Three-four-one, he acquired a bodyguard the same orn it came to his attention he was at risk. Doesn't that upset your hypothesis?}_

_{Has he agreed to learn to handle a weapon yet? He leaves it up to you, one-nine-three. Again, once your Cybertronian had a solution that doesn't involve him handling something designed to deactivate his fellow Cybertronians he ignored the entire situation. Has Perceptor ever changed his routine, even when you pointed out it would be easy to take him down by such habits?}_

_{…no. Not even if I beg him to.}_

_{Enforcers? What about them?}_ Titan tried next, since he didn't need to keep his full attention on the suspect Wraith was asking questions from. His role was to stand around and look intimidating, as per what Griz had informed him of.

 _{For Cybertronians, Enforcer is a step above military hardware upgrades. I sometimes wonder what they would think of the human Military Police, if that's what they equate their own Enforcers to. No, Cybertronians would avoid anything violent just simply because for centivorns they have all been force fed about how scary and destructive military bots are. For frag's sake, zero-two-seven_ saved _Simfur, and they want to kick him out for that. A decently successful merchant, and all they can see is the orn he blew up the bots intent on_ destroying their city _.}_

 _{Thank you for bringing me into this, three-four-one.}_ Nitro interjected sourly. _{One-two-seven's old city's been treating me rather well, I'll have you know.}_

 _{Heh, score… but not the point. Praxus was swamped by the virus before the firewall booster went out.}_ Cinder reminded him, only slightly sadly. _{Ruby, recall her? Before the virus infected her she nearly wanted nothing to do with us. After? She damn near punched out some poor medic for questioning her and Flashfire over Hell's Bells'_ military _use upgrades.}_

 _{My point exactly. Question this, why was such a virus created?}_ Shadowdancer allowed them all to turn that over in their processors a few times before continuing. _{Shockwave's notes that far back were all about his paranoia that some bot was after him. That's how he started down his pothole filled road to Decepticon Military Commander. When looking for bots to guard him for that paranoia, he found that most of Cybertron flatly refused to pick up a weapon. All those that didn't find it abhorrent or strange either went into the Cybertronian Military or Enforcers. What defected to Meagtron's side first? Half the military and the Enforcers of two separate cites.}_

 _{Three-four-one, the point please.}_ Warcry asked for the Autobot's Prime, who looked pretty damn confused over that abrupt change in subject.

_{My pet theory for how this fragged up slag started, is that Shockwave encountered the Robo-Smasher first. He then, after adapting to his new programming, brought either a friend or trusted mech he relied on to it so he would have some bot he could trust to help him. The resulting 'Megatron' probably got either a better reprogramming than he did or some other bot figured out what was happening and took advantage. Shockwave got called back to Cybertron while Megatron either went with said some bot or continued to try and figure out how to move the Robo-Smasher back planet side. Then there would be two Quintesson reprogrammed Decepticons, unleashed on the turbulent days of the fall of the Golden Age. On a society that refuses to defend itself, even in the face of a threat of painful deactivation.}_

_{The virus, three-four-one?}_ Knightblade prompted the XO after a silent moment of processing that. _{What about the virus?}_

 _{The virus was to do exactly what it did. Make it so less Cybertronians would have the moral codes against fighting. Gladiator combat only became popular_ after _Shockwave's return to Cybertron. It started from Tarn, then spread out from here. Tarn was also the first city to fall. That virus took forever to spread, from what zero-seven-zero found. It only infected one bot every cycle, and then those two infected two more, then four bots spread it on, so on. Tarn's destruction spread the virus carriers to other cities, Gygax as their closest neighbor and Kalis as their other. Then on to Polyhex as the northern territory connected to them; then Kaon and Alithex; on to Central, Simfur, and Vos; trickling into Praxus and Tyger Pax. Crystal City, Ankmoor, Iacon, and Yuss are the farthest points not blocked off by the acid sea and the Magnesium Mountain Range, even if they are only a few short kilometers away at some points.}_

"That is also the pattern of illegal Gladiator combat popularity." Prowl informed Warcry blandly. "If Shadowdancer's theory is correct, that was just a symptom and not the root of the problem itself."

_{Prowl, it's also the upswing in crime Cybertron has been plagued with ever since the fall of the Golden Age.}_

The black and white Praxian cocked an optic ridge at that.

Warcry could only shrug in answer. "Yeah, they can hear you."

"Shadowdancer, why?" Optimus asked, expectantly waiting her response on the pad diligently recording the SPARTAN-Bots' tactical uplink conversation.

He wasn't disappointed.

 _{Cybertron was in the middle of a civil conflict already, well before the fall of the Golden Age. Which is all well and good, civil insurrection like that would have just changed up the worst parts of your society and ensured you could continue for another few centivorns without issue. But your Decepticon faction was too violent, to us anyways. It made more than a few of us confused, because as far as we could see there was no reason for such destruction. They were destroying themselves_ and _what they professed to want to defend. It was more of a madness than simple, mostly peaceful protests a society like yours would have started with. Riot wasn't a word in your language until after Tarn's destruction. What I have here now is what should have been the Decepticon faction as is, mostly prior military bots and those with grievances with the prior governing structure of Cybertron. What's left are all either civilian bots too far gone to be rational, or those that just want to fight for fighting's sake.}_

The Prime considered that for a long moment. "All of them are too far gone?"

 _{More than most of them. Due to secrecy and security concerns we may have missed a number, but after everything is settled here and we have no mass defections from Megatron's side to Tarn what's left won't be much more than drones with sparks intent on sheer destruction for the little it will allow them to feel.}_ Shadowdancer, even if she wasn't seen doing it, could only shrug. _{What happens after that will be up to you and whoever it is that comes out of this new faction as leader. But this way you won't have to destroy everything with a Decepticon faction insignia just to get the fighting to stop, just the bots that will flatly refuse to give up their destructive habits.}_

"So what, should we destroy them for the slagging virus that turned their internal coding into glitched up fragments?" Ratchet asked loudly next, glaring at the pad in lieu of the Praxian femme herself.

_{Can you fix it?}_

Scowling, the medic simply glowered at the innocent machine.

_{Soundwave, my pick for the mech in charge here, thinks and has experimented with a reformat on one of those virus infected bots. So far it looks to have worked, but it's still in the early cycles yet so any real issues have yet to occur. Even if it does work, that's still at least two cities of bots to quarantine and reformat. Then, of course, if we do the reformatting option there will be complaints that either faction is reprogramming bots to support them and not just to erase this problem. And that's not accounting for any more bots that got out of the southern part of Cybertron before this and is spreading that virus more. Suggest something else, Ratchet.}_

"What about a neutral party, then?" Elita-One asked next, still somewhat uncomfortable by the discussion.

_{Who? The Neutrals themselves? They would reprogram bots to avoid both factions and nothing would get done then. We'll be stuck in a civil conflict for vorns until something extreme happens again, then some bot will accuse whoever it was of mimicking Megatron's methods.}_

"Alpha Trion." Optimus suggested next. "He reformats the Primes themselves, no bot will argue against him."

_{Do you know where he is now? Additionally, isn't he Autobot inclined?}_

The questions brought the Prime up short, and he wondered about that himself.

Warcry merely sighed, cursing out his XO on a private channel for the processor ache she had given him. "Well discuss it later. This _is_ it, right? There's no more little surprises you've got locked away just to spring on us later?"

_{You did call for a waltz, sir. Now that I've halved the problem, this should go a bit more smoothly.}_

_{You also added a new dimension to the conflict, ma'am.}_ Silentforce reminded her absently, ignoring Refit as she took the opportunity to poke his malfunctioning vocalizer system again. _{Instead of three dimensions there's now four. Autobots, two factions of Decepticons, and the Neutrals.}_

 _{Five if you add seekers.}_ Drax suggested dryly, even as Starscream got through defending his actions and tetchily demanded to hear what the Air Commander thought would justify trying to judge him.

 _{Six with minibots, though they don't normally have much to do with surface bots.}_ Trickflip tacked on cheerfully. _{They are going to want to know what the slag is up with Tarn's underground, now that we're here.}_

 _{But this will no longer be vaguely justified if mostly senseless violence against the old guard of Cybertron. Much, much easier to actually work out accords with than a faction that will only accept their way or none at all. To the bitter end, as is.}_ Shadowdancer gave her unhelpful and unabashed about it fellows a hard look for making it seem much worse than it should be. _{We just need to figure out what the slag to do with the crazy ones.}_

(ooo000ooo)

"Starscream, for slag's sake, mute it." Drax irritably informed the seeker scientist, quelling the disagreeable rev of his turbines. "We have enough problems as is, don't add to it."

What amounted to the Decepticon's version of the Air Commander held himself even more stiffly, but the SPARTAN-Bots' trine leader didn't let him continue.

"If you still have the coordinates of your old field mission partner, I'm pretty sure the _ATHENS_ wouldn't mind locating where the slag the target planet is at now. She can do that, you know." Drax waved a hand to where the bridge of the interstellar ship lay, slouching as much as he could in the oddly built chairs. His wing joints got in the way, making him rather intent on finding the ship new interior furniture if they kept using her as a mobile but securable meeting place. "When it's all over, some of us plan on galaxy hopping again. You can come with and find the mech then drag his frame home if need be."

Hesitating, the seeker peered suspiciously at him. "The window of opportunity for effectively rescuing Skyfire has closed."

"If he was stupid and kept himself online until his energy stores ran dry, yes. However, if he's as smart as you made him sound he would have put himself in stasis to prevent deactivation before you could return." The SPARTAN informed him dryly, reconfirming with Knightblade that such a thing was possible. "He'll probably be a little rusty and a bit dinged up from vorns of time spent with his frame sitting there, but he's probably still there."

"How would _you_ know such a thing?" Starscream asked sourly, but even as he considered the possibility he figured if Skyfire had been worried he probably would have done just that. It didn't make the events that turned the seeker to the Decepticons any less infuriating, but less bitterly final for his old friend. "If you are not Cybertronian in nature?"

"Oh we are now, just not way back when. To answer your question, I have a link with the SPARTAN assistant of Perceptor of Crystal City. Who just reaffirmed the fact stasis-lock is an automatic emergency protocol every bot sent out past Cybertron's atmosphere possesses… also standard for military and most of the Autobots by the previous CMO's orders." He thought about it a bit more, then merely shrugged at the bewildered silver seeker. "If you don't wish to inform the _ATHENS_ herself, you can ask Refit to calculate it for you. She's our old navigator, she's still got the programming for figuring that out. It'll just be one more slagging thing to do before we're done."

This had not been how Starscream had expected this to go. His confusion was apparent to his trine if not the two seeker council members and the new Air Commander, which irritated him slightly because Skywarp would snicker over it all later and Thundercracker would snort every slagging time the mech was brought up in conversation. It had been getting to the point the former scientist had wanted to somehow take over the Decepticon faction and simply go rescue his old mission partner himself, but that had been before a Praxian femme with more titanium in her alloy than normal dropped in on him and a handful of other seekers.

Additionally, while Starscream was sure he'd be a vast improvement over Megatron as the Leader of the Decepticon Armada he really only wanted to find Skyfire and protect the seekers from the ground pounders' expectations for their frame set. Which made him distinctly less than inclined to try for a power grab with a mech that was a veteran of the old Tarn gladiator games, because he really had little interest in ordering around the ground bound bots that made up the bulk of the Armada.

Then again, even _Soundwave_ would be an improvement over Megatron. At least the former communications officer wouldn't deactivate his own troops for delivering bad news.

He decided to wait and see.

This seemed better than Megatron's Armada setup, at least more organized even if it was still in the early cycles. Then again, Megatron's Decepticon faction had _seemed_ to be a better option than playing along and ignoring his seeker trine protocols like Sentinel Prime had expected of the newly returned and slightly desperate Starscream. That hadn't exactly worked out as he thought it should.

Drax seemed to be a much better mech than Thunderstrike, anyways. The SPARTAN seeker's trine was badly unbalanced, but they still worked around it like any trine would and seemed comfortable with each other. Compared to a possible Air Commander who _deactivated_ his old trine for disagreeing with him, anything would be.

Starscream had a bit more time than he thought, anyways. He'd use some of it to see what would come of this, then make some plans if it didn't seem to be going his way.

(ooo000ooo)

"Not very typical, is Drax?"

Starscream gave Lightning a flat look, turning back to arranging a regular sweep of the decimated city.

Seekers were less vulnerable to the whims of terrain, and as the flying frame set of Cybertronians it was up to them to ensure their new base was secure against any reprisals from Megatron's faction of Decepticons. The former scientist wasn't too sure what was left of the Decepticon Armada, having seen most if not all the bots he would even remotely trust with a blaster here. Which would mean the ones Starscream would avoid just on principle were left with the ex-miner mech.

Unusually enough, he had yet to be ordered to do so.

"Why should they? You lead the seekers here."

The silver seeker gave the seeker council member another bland look. "That so called _Lord_ Megatron felt it necessary to order such things instead of allowing us to arrange it. There are a few bots from Gygax itself here, I was expecting to be forced to do something to them if they thought they could merely step into that mech's role. I may not have been much of a match for the mech on the ground, and therefore forced to conform to such things, but I am less leery that I would be outmatched now with these bots."

"I have never understood why the frag you went with him, scraplet." Lightning claimed dryly, turning his attention back to the shallowest parts of the Tarn base. The level that neatly housed the seeker frame set was somewhat removed from the main halls of the base, and was built wider than the rest of what the older mech had seen so far. Conforming to the seeker claustrophobia, the ceiling in this part was almost high enough to allow Tigerstripe the helm space to not be able to reach the ceiling if he tried without thruster assistance. "Thunderstrike I understood. My old student was more than a little reckless and aggressive, you on the other servo? Why did you decide to seek refuge with that mech of all bots?"

Starscream set his data pad down, giving the council member his full attention. "Before that, I have a few queries for you. Were you aware Thunderstrike had arranged the deaths of his old trine or not?"

The older seeker's turbines stuttered as the mech gaped at him.

"Thought not. For my next question; had you not been displaced from Vos, would you have bothered escorting the Air Commander out here to meet with us?" The former scientist pressed on, heedless to the reaction his words elected from the other seeker. "I do have to wonder why it was you came out. Is it more than a little cramped in Iacon?"

"Just a bit, sure." Spotter, the slighter of the Air Commander's trine mates, informed him instead of Lightning. "Though it's not so bad now that half of what engineers and construction bots we've got are attempting to carve a new city out of the cliffs over the Iacon/Central highway. Whiteout and Lightning were ordered to come, though, for the point you're trying to reach."

Starscream gave the mech a slight nod, which caused the scout to continue on his way with a half-sparked salute in return. "My point being, you still seem to hold this conflict as merely a ground pounder squabble. It's not. We have just as much problem with the seeker council as the former Decepticon Armada has with the Ancient Council and the Autobot forces that tried to ensure they were unchanging over centivorns. Part of which, we are just as guilty of."

"There is _nothing_ wrong with the seeker council."

"Yeah, there is." Drax refuted calmly as he wandered up to them, alerted by Spotter that the discussion was going on. "Mech's got a point, Lightning. _Would_ you have bothered to come out here if I didn't order you to? Why the _frag_ not? They are _seekers_ , you're supposed to be the council they can go to if there's something seriously wrong. So what if that serious wrong was with either the Prime's orders or the supposed next Air Commander? Still something you should have dealt with… or at least _listened_ to once if at all."

"I _never_ heard a whisper of such things." Lightning defended himself, rather confused over how this had become a problem.

"Why didn't you?"

The older seeker paused, staring at the SPARTAN trine leader.

"Because you isolated yourself in Vos." Starscream informed him bitterly. "In a cage of steel and crystal of your own make, preventing those that should have access to air out problems from getting to you. When Sentinel Prime gave me orders that _violated_ my seeker programming, you did nothing. Five to ten _vorns_ after the fact a seeker that could arrange the deactivation of his _own trine_ was still wandering around, and you were perfectly oblivious to what had occurred."

"I've heard Starscream's grievances, and so did you not a joor ago." Drax unhelpfully reminded the old seeker. "If that amount of gross abuse was allowed to go on, why are you surprised they sought a different way?"

"That's… slag it all." Lightning pressed one hand to his optic, running that view of things through his processor.

"That will not continue, I'll ensure it." The SPARTAN continued blandly. "You may not like it, but there will be changes. Starscream, I'm only halfway through talking to your seekers. It'll be another few joors before I'm done."

"Very well."

"Get together any extra you bots need, I've already placed an order for the oil and lubricants our frame set requires. But since it seems as if there will be a third supply run, Holdout agreed to ensure any frameset specific items are sent along. You can get it transmitted from any of my trine and the other SPARTANs if need be."

The Decepticon's seeker commander acknowledged that with a nod, getting up to seek out the other trine leaders for the bulk of what they would want requested.

\V/

Nitro hesitated, casting a glance to the general location Jackknife knew Simfur was in.

"Well? What's the score?" He prompted after a long silent moment, regaining the demolition specialist's attention.

"Simfur, as a whole, has decided as long as I conform to a few restrictions I may return." The SPARTAN informed the mech blandly. "More notably a tracking chip implanted in my systems, so every bot will know where the frag I'm at. Then a whole lot of other slag I'm sure will get me deactivated in short order, so… no."

The once former thieves' enforcer blinked at him, wondering if he was slightly horrified at the demand or pitying the city as a whole.

Ignoring his reaction, the Praxian twisted slightly to scan over the bots grouped together in a bar they pretty much single handedly kept running themselves. "Hell's Bells, you still want to enlist in the Autobots?"

The black and silver femme darted over to the cohort unit of Rook's, beaming at the mech. "Yes, why?"

"I'll take you there, then I've got a bit of traveling to do myself." Nitro informed her with a small smile. "If you have anything you want taken on to Trickflip or one-two-seven, I'll need it before we get you enlisted."

"Are you just going to abandon them all?" Jackknife asked, morbidly curious.

"Abandon? Frag no. They have decided they don't wish me to return, but don't have the alloy to claim it outright. Like Clearsight, I've decided it's not worth it." Giving him a small, dismissive flap of his doorwings, the Praxian picked up his cube of energon again to drain it. "I've got a friend there that will pack up my stuff, then I'm going to pitch in with a few others in their little plans."

Silverbell took only a short moment to realize what they were talking about, a disgusted rev of her engine informing both mechs of her opinion on the subject. "Well, screw them."

Nitro gave an almost unwilling laugh at that. "That's what Clearsight said about her city, too. Frag it all, femme, you've been hanging around us too much."

"You say that like it's a bad thing." The Autobot hopeful claimed airily, in a very good imitation of Rook. "I don't see the problem."

"The silver lining of this slag is, if I go replace Cinder out there she may get permission to come back quicker than we thought." The SPARTAN mech gave his drinking buddy a gamin grin. "Then you'll only have to deal with two moping Praxians and not three."

Jackknife gave him a flat stare. "You're a whole lot slagging better than that Enforcer mech or his brother. I'd rather deal with you grumbling than his depressive airs. He _still_ glares at me for the fragging illegal things I used to do."

"Sucks to be you then, mech." Nitro slapped him on the back plates, getting up to follow Silverbell's route to her creators so they could give their goodbyes.

(ooo000ooo)

Axel gave the femme a shrug. "Why the slag are you surprised, anyways? Would you go along with all that they demanded of him?"

Roulette stiffened up, but after a moment she gave him a frustrated gesture instead. "The council said he could come back though, why not? I thought he was waiting on that."

"He was waiting to see what they would decide on, then if reasonable he would decide on what he wanted to do." Tossing more components into a shipping crate, the once former bounty hunter kicked the full bin over to the back of the store and dug out a new one to be filled from the stack of collapsed ones near the front. "Nitro, and the rest of those SPARTANs, wanted Simfur's measure before any decisions were made. Obviously, they've decided Simfur can managed themselves rather than submit one of their own to such… slagged up frag."

"Okay, so it's bad. I know it's bad, but they wouldn't listen to me when I tried to tell them that." The Enforcer scowled at him, stepping around the mech's work so she wouldn't be in the way. "But if Nitro doesn't put up with it, how are we supposed to know they won't do something-"

"Do something what? Like deactivate half the city in one off-cycle?" Axel asked, vocalizer setting dry enough to evaporate the acid sea. "He hasn't by now, why do you expect him to do it after all this? He was assigned Simfur to _defend_ , not be discriminated by."

"It's not dis-"

"Yes, yes it is. You know it Roulette. _This_ is what's wrong with Cybertron." Shoving an armload of parts at her, the mech snagged the crate closer to fill it up. "The fact bots think that's the proper response to a bot that has the loosest ties with the military living among them. You wouldn't put up with it, why expect him to?"

"Nitro's a _war built_."

"He never _asked to be_."

Roulette blinked at him.

Axel gave her a hard look of his own. "And you know what? That's why I became a bounty hunter in the first slagging place. My mech creator was prior military, he never managed to find respectable work after leaving the Cybertronian Military. The few options left to him was as a fragging junk sorter or something not strictly legal, and the not strictly legal option paid better."

"…not even the Enforcers?"

"Nope, he was too heavily programmed for military use for them."

She frowned slightly at his back plates. "I highly doubt-"

"Don't even. You were built for civilian function, so you never encountered that." Axel dumped the last of the Praxian's stock parts, idly wondering how the mech would have it all transported. SPARTANs, though, they tended to pull stupid slag and get away with it just because no other bot thought about it first. "When the Military was called back to Cybertron's surface, they found themselves stuck and without any bot willing to give them honest work for a decent wage. Why do you fragging _think_ they all went to the one mech that gave them something to do in response when you all didn't even slagging bother to care?"

Roulette wondered, even after she finished helping the mech pack up the last of the SPARTAN's stock components, how much of that was true.

She wondered all the way back to her station, and reported the fact Simfur was about to be sans one military bot to her superiors.

Their reactions to her news was less than… ideal to her.

"Good," sniffed the Government worker that had asked her to attempt getting Nitro's answer out of his shop assistant, "one less thing to worry about."

"Excuse me sir, but we now have more things to worry about." The Enforcer femme corrected slowly. "Without Nitro, we're a little less than prepared for another Decepticon attack."

"I highly doubt such a thing will happen again." Rhodium gave her a less than impressed look for that. "Such things are now in the past, Enforcer, concentrate on your work."

Roulette gave her Station Chief a wide-optic look, causing him to heave a sigh.

"I know." The mech informed her lowly as they exited the conference room the bot had absconded with for his visit. "Any chance this Nitro mech left more explosives lying around?"

\V/

Although they sometimes kept to strange schedules, normally between cases the forensic teams usually held mostly stable habits.

Griz noted that Titan had been more than a little distracted already, but since the SPARTAN Enforcer kept up with what he and the rest of his team needed the lead investigator had ignored it. Once they had finished up with the little tasks needed of them until the next crime scene they needed to process, the older mech called Titan over.

The former SWAT Enforcer gave him a long look. "So far as we know, Simfur or Crystal City are next up as Decepticon targets. Simfur has also decided they didn't want their SPARTAN, as well. If something happens, I'll be called out to support either one. So will Quickgrip, but he'll likely be asked to try something for Simfur while I'll go to Knightblade's aid."

Wraith nearly tripped over the benches set up to prevent bots from tripping over each other, spinning around to get a good look at Tyger Pax's SPARTAN. "What?"

"Simfur and Praxus are still standing after Megatron's Decepticons have decided they need to fall. The mech's not going to ignore that they're still standing in defiance of that." The anti-armor assault specialist informed them both slowly, looking puzzled. "Why, if that's rather obvious to any bot with halfway working processors, would the bots in charge of Simfur decide to set unrealistic demands on Nitro if he wanted to return to their city?"

"Why wouldn't Praxus be attacked again, then, if you're sure Simfur will be for the same reason?" Griz asked instead of answering the mech right away.

"Rook trained up an army to respond even if she's not there." Titan shrugged, resuming his efforts to clear a streak of unknown fluid off his armor plating as he turned the issue over in his processors. "Additionally, those army bots are _still_ there and don't look to want to move any time soon. Any attack would have to go through those bots first, and while they had the element of surprise the first time that's probably not going to happen again."

"Point." Acknowledged the older mech thoughtfully. "To answer your question, I do not know. Perhaps they feel safe enough now that their attack is over to not want a military built mech in residence?"

"But they're not." Titian insisted. "They might even be a high priority target because they survived an attack."

"That may not be how they see it."

The SPARTAN gave him a still confused look, but eventually shrugged. "Slag it all… I hope Quick's got a plan, then. Or Simfur's going to be the next city to fall."

Griz thought about that, even as Titan left for the cycle to pick up the youngling he was Guardian to.

Socially, he supposed he could see the point.

Not a lot of bots were comfortable with the SPARTANs, but the general take of Tyger Pax was more of an out of sight, out of processor type thing. Their SPARTAN Enforcer was less seen since he switched from SWAT to investigative criminal service, meaning most civilians of their own city didn't have to deal or have a way to deal with meeting the mech himself. Coming face to faceplate with Tyger Pax's own military built was less an orn to orn risk and more of a risk taken by bots less than strictly legal. Therefore acceptable, in a twisted kind of way Griz had been taking advantage of in their rare interrogations.

On the other servo, Simfur's SPARTAN had picked a civilian job class to work at. Nitro might not have lied, but learning the mech had the characteristics of a war build and you had previously dealt with him would be more than a little disturbing. It would explain why the backlash of the SPARTAN-Bot revelation was much worse for the Praxian SPARTAN there rather than the Enforcer one here.

Perhaps he should quietly spread word to Titan's old boss, to get the problem actually looked at instead of tolerated. At the very least, to get something set up for the eventuality of the next attack.

\V/

Refit couldn't keep them all contained, seeing as a few of the SPARTANs merely needed small repairs and only the two that had been in Gygax the longest needed major ones.

Galeforce had darted out to check on the seeker contingent, and hitch a ride with the _ATHENS_ back to Central just to help both Holdout and Nitro load the ship for her next supply run. The 2IC of the SPARTAN-Bots had left Sunstreaker in charge of ensuring the little former AI's safety while he was gone, something the gold twin was content to do… or at least not complain about.

Trickflip, Cinder, and Orpheus had split off to check on the settling Cybertronians either making use of the new Tarn base or taking stock of what they still needed.

Sideswipe was faced with a choice of either getting impressed as a medic's aid or finding something else to do for the time being, and the silver swordmech chose to run while he could.

Which left Silentforce, as they had yet tracked down what system was slowly leaking and left it up to his auto-repair for the short term until Refit had a handle on the repairs needed to be conducted on the old military bots, and Shadowdancer as the only SPARTANs that still required repairs.

It was once Kynaite had decided to try figuring out where the red and black bodyguard was still leaking from that the Praxian femme spotted him. Leaving her youngling to the former bar bouncer's care, the tactician very calmly made her way across the busy med bay to where Hook had been corralled and impressed in helping the bots affected with rust rash treat their metals.

"Hook, right? I've a question, mech."

The Constructicon, who had many questions posed to him so far, responded in a bored tone. "Take a compressed crystal of oxalic acid and place it in water, wait for it to dissolve and then use it to remove the rust buildup."

"Not quite my problem, thanks."

Hook turned to brush off the bot talking to him, but ended up gripped by the throat cables and smashed into his worktable by a very irritated looking Praxian femme.

"Now that I have your attention… you wouldn't happen to have done a few illegal upgrades to sparklings for a few extra credits, right?" Shadowdancer gave him a very pointed, red optic look, then gestured to the youngling currently halfway into Silentforce's systems. "Like say the sparkling of a gladiator mech named Granite?"

"Sounds familiar?" Trying, and failing, to remove the claws currently buried in his vulnerable neck, Hook attempted to get some bot's attention who would take the femme's attention off him. "What's the problem, anyways?"

"You screwed up, that's what." She informed him blandly. "He's retained a bit of processor damage from the bot that decided he was better suited to tinkering with a sparkling's systems than a medically programmed one. I have an issue with that."

"Then it couldn't have been me, I _don't_ screw up." Hook sharply informed her in return, a bit more than just annoyed. "If I would have done something like that, I would have taken the time to do it right. I'm not the bot you're looking for."

"But you did upgrade Granite's sparkling for him, yes?"

The Constructicon hesitated at that question. "Err… yeah?"

Shadowdancer nodded almost pleasantly, but her claws tightened their grip on him. "And since said sparkling later came into my care, with said processor damage from an illegal upgrade, that would mean whatever resulted was in effect something you did. Right?"

"…possibly?"

"Glad we could clear that up." The Praxian claimed, then slammed him helm first into the slab of metal he had been working off of.

Then she did it again, rendering the mech unconscious.

"Shadow'! Stop knocking the bots I have helping me off-line!" Refit scolded as she made her way over, frowning at the tactician. "There are only so many of them, and I fragging _need_ the help."

"Very sorry, 'fit." Shadowdancer claimed cheerfully, dropping Hook's insensible frame to crash into the ground with indifference. "But we had a bit of a difference of opinion about sparklings and the proper working order of their processors."

The medic blinked her optics at the 3IC, then glanced to where Kynaite was happily busy with the defensive strategist's systems. "Oh. Well… you solved it, yes?"

"Sure, as long as he doesn't do it again."

"Good, then stop making more work for me."

Shadowdancer gave her a shrug-flap of her remaining doorwing. "Very sorry, again. By the way, Nitro's coming down to help. He's not much better trained, but at least he'll make up for Hook being… incapacitated."

\V/

The first signs of whatever Megatron would do in response was a number of the mines Nightstalker had scattered on the very edges of Tarn's ruined city limits going off.

Greenlight, fresh from hammering out how this Decepticon faction would be run, was less than pleased to hear that. "They can't have known where the slag we went, unless some bot's stupidly helping them along."

"Before we start hunting for a traitor that may not be there, among a number of bots that might as well be called traitors in the first place," Orpheus interjected dryly, "let's be sure they're headed this way and not just testing the outer limits. Give these bots time to sort themselves out, it'll be easier to hunt through them that way."

"Point." The former Ancient Council member acknowledged, scanning the third level of the Tarn base and the still confused sprawl of bots finding their way to assigned quarters or where their usual partners in crime were located. "Now, who to send."

"Seekers. They're faster than any bot over land and can remain out of range if need be."

Grimacing, the femme cast a glance upwards where the seeker contingent was thought to be. "I hate dealing with seekers."

"Allow me." The assassin offered easily, a grin as slick as oil plastered across his faceplate. "I know a few."

"Be gone, then." She informed him, already distracted from his presence. " _Barricade!_ I would like to speak with you."

Orpheus blinked at her back plates, but did take the excuse to leave the press of the third level even if he didn't have to move just to talk to his fellow SPARTANs.

 _{What, exactly, am I looking for?}_ Spotter asked of their 3IC as he headed up to reach the surface.

 _{A concentration of bots waiting for further orders. If it's just scouts that ran afoul of Nightstalker's mines, there should be spots of avoidance around the old city limits.}_ Shadowdancer informed him slowly. _{Aren't you a recon scout? You should know how that goes.}_

_{Yeah, but after you taking the CO to task about Cybertronian not human methods, I'd figure I should at least double check.}_

_{…do Decepticons have standard operating procedures?}_ Galeforce asked idly, double checking the _ATHENS_ ' systems for another supply run to hit Central and Simfur. The stealth shields were already enabled, but if it looked to be a raiding party and not merely bots looking for them he would take the ship into the sky to lead off any pursuit. _{It never really seemed as if they did up in Iacon.}_

 _{Not so much as SOP as you're expected to fulfill whatever order to the best of your ability.}_ Orpheus informed them all, as the still sole Decepticon in the SPARTAN-Bot unit he had the best experience with Decepticon orders. _{So think… moronic, half-trained scouts. What would they do?}_

 _{Preferably, run into a few hundred mines and leave us the frag alone.}_ Spotter suggested dryly as he took off to observe the bots teasing the edges of Tarn.

Shadowdancer sighed heavily as she took that into account. _{That will not stand. I refuse to be part of a military outfit with no slagging clue how to conduct at least the basics of another job class.}_

_{The old military bots could probably do with a refresher course in a few things too.}_

_{You are not helping, one-four-four.}_

Sighing as Silentforce took over for her in the argument the assassin wanted to pick, the Praxian femme turned to Soundwave. "How did it go, anyways?"

"Unit Greenlight: Base Commander. Unit Starscream: Seeker Commander. Unit Bludgeon: Director of Base Services. Unit Soundwave: Military Commander."

"Mmm, interesting." She considered it for another moment, tapping a half recalled rhythm on her repair berth. "You may wish to add one more to that, to break any stalemates that might occur. A CMO, probably, once we actually have one."

Soundwave inclined his helm to where the SPARTANs' medic was fluttering around, rapidly going through what wire she had on her to repair a few of the worst off old military mechs.

"She's not Decepticon. Furthermore, 'fit's still got a few more vorns on her apprenticeship to go. Until then, she's based out of the Iacon med bay as the senior apprentice of the Autobots' CMO."

"Inquiry: Distance from Iacon?"

"We're her medical mastery project, outlining the differences between human and Cybertronian and how our systems translated over." Shadowdancer informed him, giving a half a shrug for his stare. "What? She's SPARTAN and it's being done with our approval. It needed to be done, anyways. There was also a bit of a programming error she went out to deal with in us, but that's pretty much dealt with now."

(ooo000ooo)

The second sign was near Crystal City.

Knightblade was less than impressed at getting their latest direction for research interrupted for some other scientist's questions, and even less amused when the first alerts rang out.

This couldn't have been a planned on raid, given that neither Shadowdancer nor Orpheus knew of it before they absconded with a large number of Decepticons last cycle. Meaning probably badly led, directionless forces with very little coherence of whatever reasoning this attack had.

Perceptor cut his conversation with the other mech short, turning to see what was going on.

Since his living quarters was part of a crystal tower complex, they had a very good view of the surrounding landscape through the thinner parts of the opaque outer walls. Due to the height, they also could see as far as their optical pickup stretched.

Wheeljack was pretty sure Knightblade's optics picked up detail much farther than his own, something he had never asked about because Perceptor's living quarters sometimes cause him vertigo when he didn't watch where he was going. He turned to ask her about how many bots that was, but trailed off when he realized she wasn't in the room anymore. "Err… Percy? Where's Knight'?"

The scientist turned again to locate his assistant, who came out of her berth room carrying a very long, very sleek looking rifle. "Here, 'jack. Do me a favor and stay in, yeah?"

"You're not actually going to go down there, are you?" The inventor questioned nervously, glancing back to where the supposed Decepticon forces were amassing.

"Nope. I don't have to." She informed him dryly as she ensured her sniper rifle was loaded and she had extra acid pellets. "I'm a _sniper_ , and we live in a _tower_. Those bots are already in my reach, there's no reason to go and wander into theirs."

"Knightblade-"

"They get three warning shots, Percy."

"Be that as it may, I must request non-lethal shots if at all possible. If what you have reported from the conversation between your fellows is accurate as Shadowdancer strikes me as being, then a solution would be easily worked out if we have the afflicted subjects at servo. Bearing that in processor, if we are to find a solution to the question your cohort sister has posed we require them still functioning."

His assistant considered that and him for a long moment. "Percy, in order to get them to stop if they are as heedless to the risks as suggested I'm going to have to shoot them. It's easier to shoot once through the helm or where the spark chamber is located than trying for two or three shots to render a bot immobile, especially in this number. If they get in the city, it will be harder for me to safely snipe them. Instead I'll have to risk my own spark getting in close range, and I'm not the best at close-quarters combat."

"We have Enforcers, Knightblade, who should take such burdens on themselves as long as the number of threats are reduced to a more manageable scale. Are you professing you cannot do as I asked of you?"

Knightblade gave him a flat look for that slight dig. "I can, but I wonder if you know what it is you're asking for. Ponder this Percy, who's going to fix them once it's over? Or will they be ignored, to deactivate as they will on the outskirts of the city as long as they do not threaten it's civilians at all? So far as we've seen, the latter is more likely than the former."

Wheeljack rubbed the underside of his battle mask as he watched the door close behind her. "Err… Percy? She didn't seem all that… pleased."

"I am aware I have somewhat impaired the relations between us," the older mech informed him rather tartly if the inventor was any judge of the mech, "and my request was both impertinent, due to my lack of interest in military expertise in refuting invasion attempts and being not of the armed command she normally adheres to, and insulting to her personally. Beyond that, my request was more for the aid of their publicly accepted opinion. They, and the rest of the military inclined fellows across Cybertron, will not perceive mass deactivation as a deterrent; the less inclined will protest such views. When she returns, I will clarify the reasoning I have for such a request."

"And you heard her, she's a sniper." Wheeljack pointed out just to be annoying, because she was a friend of his too. "If those bots get into the city, she'll go to help the Enforcers round them up. Long distance she might have the advantage, but in close-quarters she's more likely to come to harm."

Perceptor flatly frowned at him. "I am aware of that, and that my request has a marginal chance to impair her significantly."

(ooo000ooo)

Knightblade spent most of the short breem running up the tower Perceptor lived within cursing out stubborn scientifically inclined mechs, then reached the balcony spot she knew would give her the greatest range with her rifle's scope. She might have to move eventually, there were taller towers around, but this would do for now.

Alerting Titan and Quickgrip was matter of fact, they were the closest cities with SPARTANs nearby. Shadowdancer, probably bored out of her processor waiting on the parts, poked for a view of what she was up against but thankfully remained silent. Warcry acknowledged the warning and started connecting to bots on his end, ensuring the sniper would have some assistance from his own city.

Epsilon was the current Enforcer Chief of Crystal City as a whole, and knew the femme herself slightly if not personally. She did appreciate the helms up before the sniping started in order to warn her own bots so they didn't panic.

It was the first time Knightblade would be using the acid pellets in her 99D-S2 sniper rifle that wasn't short range accuracy testing. She might have the Cybertronian variation of sniping protocol, but her human habits persisted. Those also proved correct, as human habits compensated for gravity's pull and not the Cybertronian ones unless you had them patched for such things.

There were drawbacks to kicking all the military bots off planet, a slight adjustment phase needed for space developed tactics included.

Knightblade had three shots to true her sights, and while her first shot pulled too far down her second one neatly clipped the rocks nearby the lead bot in charge down there. She waited a beat, but when it seemed as if the lead mech was content to ignore it as a random if close shot she instead shot out the guts of the battered Neutron Assault Rifle the mech held.

If the acid splashed across his finger joints… oh well.

There was finally a pause as the ragged Decepticon group took in the fact some bot with a sniper rifle and acid pellets had no problem with _shooting at them_ , during which Knightblade sighed and reloaded both her clip and set up a few more within easy grabbing distance.

When the Decepticons charged, intent on getting within the city's glittering gates and off the open plains of crystal studded rock formations, the sniper started shooting in earnest.

Half her processor on her almost automatic acquire target, shoot, and change target; she counted down the number of pellets she had and compared it to about how many bots she had yet to deal with.

She might have had enough… had Perceptor not asked what he did of her.

(ooo000ooo)

"What the frag is Megatron processing?"

"Is he processing? There's a question for you." Trickflip answered the Praxian femme that posed the question.

"I know it's tempting to simply label the mech cracked up the wrong way, but that will just get us all killed so can it. He _is_ smart, smart enough to split Cybertron in half with a few vorns of work." Shadowdancer reminded him sourly. "But we've got a large group of bots milling about up there, and there's a section of bots storming Crystal City's gates. That's… probably all of Polyhex between us and Knight'. One, where is the Gygax contingent? And two, where in the _fragging Pits_ is Megatron himself?"

_{Did we not plan on a reprisal for this?}_

"We planned on a few cycles of confusion first." The tactician corrected Silentforce, scowling off in the direction of Gygax itself. "Simply because the sheer amount of bots we just made away with _is_ partially some of his command chain."

"Think he's trying to cover any mass defection up?" Cinder posed after a long, silent moment processing that. "If the Gygax bots question where their bots are, he can just say they got deactivated and not be forced to admit they refused to follow him anymore. Same would be true for the Polyhex bots."

Shadowdancer merely allowed her engine to hum as she considered that. "Or maybe… what's the closest city to Polyhex? Central?"

"Err… yeah. If you discount Kaon and what remains of Vos." Processing that, the infiltrator gave her a strange look. "Are you thinking distraction?"

"Why not? It's not like Megatron ever really cared for the sparks of the bots that looked to him. What would he care for how many are deactivated as long as he could bring down one of those cities that are thought to be able to stand against him? If it just so happens to cover up the dissention in his ranks, so much for the better."

"Wouldn't he go after Simfur or Praxus in that case?" Countered the saboteur, still going stiff even as she suggested her old city as a possible target. "Not an Autobot held…"

"Fortress, like Central City or Iacon itself?" Shadowdancer finished for her dryly. "What would be a better target for a mech that just got dissed by what he probably assumes are Autobot sympathizers?"

There was another long moment as the SPARTANs tried to counter that argument.

Finally, the Praxian femme sighed. "Sideswipe, Sunstreaker. I'm afraid this is it, mechs. Take Refit up to Galeforce and the _ATHENS_ , when you get to Central City leave the ship in Nitro's servos and join with the Autobot base there. If nothing happens, or after everything is done with, report back to Warcry for further assignments."

The medic in question spun around, ready to protest, but the femme who ordered her removal shook her helm.

"Don't, 'fit. You've already overrun the time limit set by Ratchet for this already. Although we appreciate you tackling the worst of the repairs, we should be able to muddy through without an actual medic for a few decacycles. If you can, get Ratchet and Xenon to help and select us a semi-competent medic to send back sometime soon. We'll greatly appreciate it."

"Who's going to install your doorwing if I leave, Shadow'?" Refit demanded, rather irritated at getting the boot this late into ensuring the bots her SPARTANs had saved would treat them right.

"Nitro's done installs and un-installs for at least a vorn. My frame brother probably won't mind fixing me up the rest of the way, and you can peer over his shoulder joints even better on the up-link than you could trying to peek over his doorwings." Shadowdancer informed her dryly, giving her a slight push to where the twins were waiting on her. "Go, or you'll delay Gale' and by association Hold' next shipment."

Drax, who had opted for listening into the conversation via the tactical up-link rather than go farther underground that he was comfortable with, spoke up next. _{Three-four-one, do you want us to go or not?}_

 _{If you are done with your seekers, then yes. You've got the best range in case of the worst, next to the_ ATHENS _herself. Just be careful not to allow two-six-zero to be spotted… or those two others you brought with you.}_

Shadowdancer then gave her youngling a considering look, where he was perched on Silentforce holding his leaking secondary valve pump together, but opted to refrain from adding that stress on top of her fellow SPARTANs for the time being.

If a Decepticon base wasn't ideal for raising a youngling, neither was an Autobot base. Nor would she ask Clearsight to care for him for a bit, given the rather ugly mood her city had to anything SPARTAN so far. Given how it worked out, she would either be forced to ask Cinder to take him to Praxus and allow him to develop there… or more preferably ask Knightblade to take him in for a vorn or so.

Titan was a possibility, but heaping another youngling on him when he already had Bumblebee wouldn't be nice of her. Additionally, the mech was very evasive over his city's reception to him and that might just happen to go the same way Simfur decided on going in response to their SPARTAN in residence.

Besides, if the scout femme formally got asked to leave Shadowdancer had another request for her instead of allowing the socially shy femme to keep slinking around the edges of Cybertronian city life.

Where _was_ Alpha Trion, anyways?

To make it worse, if that mech had something quite like a book file that predicted the future and a reality bending writing stylus then what the ever loving _frag_ were SPARTANs doing on Cybertron… and why in the Pits did that mech not show up in the last vorn to meddle or lecture or whatever an ancient Autobot archivist did when their home was invaded by formerly alien creatures of another galaxy?


End file.
